changing on the inside

My neighbor across the way moved out a few weeks ago, and now the apartment is being readied for its next inhabitant. The outside remains the same, at least for now. But there is evidence of change happening inside – the old bathtub that laid in pieces until it was picked up for the trash, the men who pull into the parking lot each morning and begin unloading equipment, the thwack of staple guns and the loud buzzing of drills and electric saws that makes my thin windows tremble. This morning as I pulled out of the driveway I saw doors and drawers, re-painted and drying in the sun and wished for my own dingy apartment to undergo such a transformation. It’s aging, and old to me. The sink old and stained, grout between tiles is browned, the hardwood floors are scratched and stained. It is home, and comfortable, yes, but I feel the ways it is growing stale.

My friend, a homeowner, just finished a renovation on her kitchen. I saw its progress in quick visits: the preparation (a port-a-potty installed on their property), the excavation (walls came down), the slow build in all its dirt and raw wood (new foundation, bare wooden frames), and then, finally, the new surfaces, the finished space. She toured me when it was done. As I pulled open new drawers and cabinets and ran my hand over the cool, smooth black counter top, we recalled where the old pieces of the kitchen once stood – the sink was here, the wall there. The old room was difficult to remember now, with this new space so concrete and beautiful.

Soon after the renovation began, we mused together on the obvious metaphor of it: old becoming new, destruction and rebuilding. We both have felt it in our lives in one way or another. I remember her saying something about the nature of renovation and how it might have been so much easier to move somewhere new, undergo a complete change, leave the old behind. Who of us hasn’t been tempted to escape and start over? But then there’s the process of owning all of the aged parts of the life we’ve been given and invest in their re-making. This process is more difficult, in some ways – if we think about the renovations in our own hearts, it’s painful to excavate all of the dusty and dingy places we hide away in unknowable depths (how is it that our finite hearts never seem to run out of infinite pathways and places to store what we would rather forget?).

I have known this instinct. When I settled back into my old life after a few months in what felt like a new one, I very much wanted to buy that new house instead of renovating the old one. But then the old one embraced me – the old apartment, the old family, the old job, everything the same – and I have been receiving, slowly, the renovation of those deep places in my heart. I’m about to rebuild you is what the Spirit said to me in those early days, speaking from the book of Isaiah, even when I hadn’t yet experienced the worst of the battering storms that would un-do me on the inside.

I may not get to see what's changed inside the apartment across the way. Someone will. My new neighbor will know its newness under his feet and as he hangs old photos on its smooth white walls. 

to be the child still

I sat near Sue on her couch. She had pulled the curtains to keep the room cool on that hot yellow morning in late October and laid out a platter of fruit and crackers on the ottoman in front of us. 

Across from the couch, on the shelf under the tv was a row of children’s books, and in the corner a posterboard decorated with stickers of friendly skulls and witch hats in green, orange and white – indicators of her nearly four-year-old granddaughter.

Sue lives with her daughter's family. Among Sue’s many roles is to take her granddaughter to preschool each morning and pick her up each day at noon. They made those Halloween posterboards together, and I’m guessing they also read those books and play with Sammy, the small brown dog who laid sleepily in the corner of the room while Sue and I talked.

I figured Sue was eager to talk about her granddaughter, and I wanted to know, so I asked. She’s just so creative, Sue said proudly. You should see what she does with legos. She told me how, every time there’s another birthday in the extended family, her granddaughter will bring out her legos and build a cake, complete with characters or figures on top, just like the Dory figurines that sat atop her cake when she turned three.

It wasn’t the details of the story that got me. Lego cakes are not that unusual. I have seen a lot of kids do a lot of things with legos. Instead, it was the way Sue told me, with such conviction that what her granddaughter created was unmatched and delight in how she sees this young one bringing forth what is inside her. In that moment, I became the child again, eager to demonstrate what I can do, eager for a subjective audience who sees me through eyes clouded with love. Maybe this is the way my Father talks about me, I thought, about the things I’m writing and about the ways I tried to love people in Kenya and the new ventures I’m embarking on.

I wanted to sit with this longer, to be the child still, but Sue kept talking, about her granddaughter and all manner of things. I put my childish desires aside but it came back to me later, when I was alone, and now, as I sit and write and build and take very seriously what might be clumsy lego birthday cakes but, to some, seem to change the world.

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(photo: not Sue's granddaughter)