The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,139
all summer, likes the fresh baked cornbread scent of crop fields on a hot summer night, likes seeing deer wander through my neighborhood munching all the hostas.
“When I daydreamed, I was nearly always designing gardens.”
At the center of your beingyou have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.
Lao-tzu
Some of what I wanted surprised me. I longed for roots. My own home. When I daydreamed, I was nearly always designing gardens. I wanted space. I wanted to plunge my hands in dirt. I wanted to make things grow. I found myself following people on horseback in Prospect Park, feeling the deficiency from the lack of equine presence in my life.
I’d been happily rolling along, having fun, and then one day I wasn’t. I was about to head overseas to stay with friends in Portugal (their invitation was what had planted the seed of this adventure in the first place). I’d already changed the ticket twice when I realized Portugal would not be the next step.
April 2, 2009: Big changes to report here. I’m not going to Portugal next on my Year as a Gypsy. I am being “called” to land somewhere and have a home again. I’m so glad I gave myself space and time for adventure and to let my life shake itself out. It was time to listen to what truly made my heart sing. And I heard it—the clarity I’d asked for.
When I leave Brooklyn on April 15, I’ll be heading home to Dayton to look for a house. I’ve been feeling downright gleeful since deciding.
And if life is like the draft of a novel, I’m not deleting the chapter “Living in Portugal.” I’m just moving it to a later slot in the manuscript, because something more powerful came bubbling forth in the story, with more energy.
I’ve learned I can label these chapters . . . but I can’t write their endings in advance.
I love asking for clarity, then getting it. More than that, I love listening to it!
And listen I did. Now, when I wake up in my lovely little dream house, with my silly boy-cat snuggled next to me, and I pad into my sanctuary of a writing office—three walls of windows overlooking my privacy-fenced garden (I tilled flower beds before I unpacked a single box)—I have no regrets and no doubts. I know for sure this is where I want to be right now.
It feels like such a privilege, such a gift, to be doing what I’ve dreamed of doing for so long. My alarm goes off early in the morning and I smile and do a little dance (like a kid on Christmas morning), eager to get to the page.
“I have no regrets and no doubts. I know for sure this is where I want to be right now.”
My year was incredible. Life altering, just like the divorce had been.
Change is inevitable. Growth is an option. I’m growing much more than flowers out in my garden.
About the book
My Own Defense of Marriage Act
“Marriage, as an institution in Western culture, is obsolete. Marriage is no longer necessary.”
THE SEED FOR THIS NOVEL came with these words. Delivered by a guest on NPR with a clipped British accent, they caused a knee-jerk reaction in me: of course marriage is necessary! But as I drove along in the rain, I thought to myself, Why? As the woman on the radio listed the many historical reasons for the creation of marriage—and argued that these reasons no longer exist—I caught myself scrambling to defend marriage. Just like the students in my English classes, I was trying to figure out how would I support my argument. What defense would I use? It troubled me that I couldn’t come up with much ammunition.
Actually, it more than troubled me. It deeply disturbed me. As my windshield wipers squeaked across my vision, I felt I should be able to grab something unequivocal, something concrete: Marriage is necessary because of X. X should be obvious. But why couldn’t I think of it?
The woman wasn’t attacking marriage. She was simply pointing out that women no longer need marriage to have status, to own property, even to have children and raise healthy families. The windshield wipers kept time as she explained that fewer people were marrying at all these days, that those who did were waiting until much later in life, and that more than half of those marriages ended in divorce.
Bleak. Nothing new or earth-shattering, but bleak as the gray,