The Do-Over

We humans are skilled at screwing things up. I myself am exceptional at it.

Who among us has never needed a second chance? How many chances have we been offered but failed to see?

Maybe that is why I love old houses in neighborhoods that have seen better days. When a house sits vacant for too long, it’s spirit wilts. It is a visible wound. At first, you cannot tell that the occupants have fled. The house sits there expectantly, awaiting somebody to return. As the days turn into weeks and the weeks into months, the energy of the home fades before eventually disappearing completely. It is as if the home has stopped waiting to be loved. When too many homes in an area become devoid of the tender ministrations of the people who dwell there, the whole neighborhood empties of hope. No matter that there are people who still live there, who hold on to the sense of place they originally found and then nurtured in their homes. The tipping point is impossible to predict exactly, but one day the whole area begins to display the sense of abandonment evident in a house that has gone too long without love.

We make judgments: This neighborhood is not a good one, it is an investment bound to fail. Love is an investment they we are all too familiar with failing. But one person moves in, able to see the home as whole if only in the delusion of the future. Then a family arrives, with noisy kids and adults consumed with business, trying to keep it all together. One by one the houses perk up. Perhaps they will be the next one chosen, perhaps their do over is just around the corner. And for no reason except that someone needed a house, and a house needed a person the energy of the neighborhood begins to feel light again, begins to feel hopeful.

I too, have succumbed to the sense of abandonment. I too, have forgotten what love feels like. Who was I, when that withered old grapevine looked to me like a vineyard? Who am I now that I can’t even remember what that naïve optimism felt like? It makes a good story, one too often retold. I was in my early twenties, trying to establish a new me after graduate school. My heart had recently been broken and I was careening towards round two. I called my mother from the crumbling porch of a long vacant bungalow where I hoped to find my footing and I gleefully announced that this home had a vineyard! I can remember who I was then because people who love me remind me of that woman now. I was starting over in the shadow of one of love’s crushing blows. I was desperate for a sense of place, desperate for hope, desperate to belong to myself again. I needed to heal and this little old house needed someone who saw past the years of neglect.

Here on the eve of altering the known universe of my children with the news that their family is changing form, I am filled with a gratitude and wonder so immense that I cannot keep the tears from falling. I have been gifted a do over, that most unlikely chance to try again. My family has lived in this old house but I stopped noticing that a dry old vine languishing in the yard holds the potential of renewal. My home has wilted as hope snuck away. I too, have succumbed to hopelessness, to the mistaken belief that there is something missing, that there is not enough love to make us whole.

Overwhelmed with a sense of compassion for my frail little humanity, I like the rest of the species thought I knew my solidity but kept disappearing. I think I am safe on my path but keep falling down and needing to start over again.  This is the lesson in so many incarnations about what happens when love is neglected: Self-love most of all. Forgiveness too: for those I have judged to have wronged me, for my judgments against myself and for the compulsion to judge at all, instead of allowing the plot to unfold. But I have become light as I took time to notice my unbelievably good fortune to be offered another chance.

It is pure Grace is that the do-over is possible: a gift from an infinitely generous universe. We are loved enough to be given the chance to start over--despite our many failures and disappointments. There are people who recognize and remember me before I forgot myself.

This is what love feels like. 

A few years after that phone call to my mom and the discovery of the little house that needed me as I  as much as I needed it, my shriveled, abandoned vine produced abundant red grapes, sweeter because of the years it was dormant. There is no way to repay such a kindness, the full faith of those who love me even as I have forgotten how to love myself; the chance to trade a withered past for fecundity. So I will allow the unfolding; drop the judgments about the years I curled up inside myself. Drop the resentment about not being seen, the narrative about who is to blame. I am already greening, delighted to find out that I have nourishment to offer. It turns out, I am just like that withered vine, maybe we all are. Not gone, just forgotten. Not forgotten, just lost.

Here then, look in my stained and calloused hands. I can offer you grapes, and that will be enough.