Reclaiming My House and Myself

After staying single for sixteen years, I finally made what I thought was the right connection and married again one last time. She and I loved each other intensely, but something that I still don't completely understand came between us, and she moved out of the house and filed for divorce little more than a year later. I was a complete basket case for the 90-day cooling off period, and I was still in a daze when we went to divorce court.

The incredible shock had its upside and its downside. The upside is that I reacted to the stress by losing the thirty pounds of excess body weight that I had been struggling with for years. The downside is that it made it necessary for me to recover ownership and control of myself and my surroundings.

If you compare this photograph with the wedding photograph in the Kristinia album, which was taken eighteen months before this one, you'll see a difference of about forty pounds in the amount of me in the picture. My weight has been stable at 195-198 pounds for the last two months, and I intend for it to stay there.

I didn't realize how much I missed my music until I was able to pull my guitars out of their hiding places and begin playing again. Once again, my music is my best friend, and I spend time every day wandering through the links to my past that my sheet music stacks provide. I haven't started plinking on my 12-string yet, but I do recall that it was the faithful friend that carried me through my first divorce, nearly thirty years ago.

Kris and I replaced my bedroom furniture with a new, more acceptable suite when we were reconciling from one of our many catastrophic separations. I had charged the cost of the new furniture on a credit card, so replacing the furniture again was not financially responsible. Symbolically, I replaced the comforter and pillow shams Kris had chosen with a set more to my own liking and got new lamps to complement them. It looks like my bedroom once again.

I also had to recover my living room, which was remarkably empty after Kris moved out on a catastrophic Monday while I was away at work. Fortunately, we hadn't disposed of my living room furniture as well, shoehorning it instead into the den with my existing den furniture. At least I had something left with which to fill the gap. To those who never saw my house with Kris' furniture in the living room, this will look unchanged except for the original lamps, which we gave to Goodwill. (I didn't like the old lamps very much either, but they were what Costco had three of at the time I needed them.) These lamps were formerly in the bedroom, but they did not go well with the new comforter. Or the old one, either, for that matter.