My House - May 21st, 2009

Today is the 3rd anniversary of when I moved into this very fine house. Three years ago. Took this big crazy step and decided to move and to do it NOW...meaning we were out of the old house in less than 2 weeks.

How did I do that?

One.. I rent. Two.. I rent from a very good friend. Three... I can be nuts when I really put my mind to it.

I had been living in a very large house that my ex-husband and I were renting when we first moved from Miami Beach up to North Miami Beach. It was a nice house, a good house. It afforded us an opportunity to make changes and yet changes were not made and as so often happens the problems of the past followed us to that house. I often think had we stayed on Miami Beach we would not have gotten divorced. Maybe I'm wrong and yet it doesn't really matter because in the end we did and that house will always be the house where my life fell apart.

This house was the house where my life was put slowly back together.

I lived in the old house eleven amazing years. Amazing because boy does life pass fast when teenagers are partying, when you have a close ongoing relationship with FPL trucks and when you are living on automatic.. which I was.. I think.

What can you say when you call the fire department that a neighbor across the street's house is on fire and FPL gets there faster than the fireman or the police? When your daughter thinks the ex (from whom you have a restraining order from) calls the police and the moment the police leave after taking a report a FPL truck pulls up and parks on the side street and stays there the sun comes up hours later. A lot of really cute FPL men I must say, especially the one with the cowboy hat but I am digressing. I think if I would draw an angel in my mind their wings back then would have been the buckets that reached high into the sky often from their trucks that so often were some company from Louisiana doing work in Florida.

:) I cannot believe I am writing this lol but I am. Because it was such a large part of the circus that went on in that house and one cannot write about this house without writing about the other.

The other house was dark, had no cross ventilation and no air moving about. It had more colors than you could paint on a house and yet you cannot paint away feelings or bad memories or create change by painting a new color on the pallet of those many walls. Okay, you can rent change for a few weeks but eventually you feel the same whether the walls are canyon coral or sea foam green. One wall was both... really.
My kids partied nonstop practically from the moment we moved in til the moment we moved out and they moved the party here. The bench died at 1151 and we never got another one. We had a few there..the kids sat on it and called themselves "porch monkeys" and many fine, upstanding people in the community would drive by and scowl at youth having it's day in the Florida sun. If not then...when?

But.. I had to move. The family became smaller, including the young hanger ons who would stay for a week or two or more with one of my kids because they were best friends and had problems at home or were "down visiting" or whatever excuse there was to stay at "the Meyer House" which was more a bed and breakfast than a home. Was time to move... my landlord had another house down the block and around the corner a bit. Smaller, easier I thought to live in and it was a needed change. Unsure whether to move or not he sent over the "handyman" lol who trust me was really handy often :) and he tossed the keys at me for 920 and said, "Bracha.. (he calls me Bracha in his great Trinidad accent) Bracha.... here are the keys to 920, go over there, look at it, think on it.. MAKE UP YOUR MIND... now you have two sets of keys. Let us know which one you want. Now you got two houses, choose one!" and he got in his pick up truck and smiled and drove off :)

I chose this one. I chose change.

I took one of my closest hurricane buddies to look at the house. He looked, walked around the back and the sides and the front. Pointed out the trees that would cause a problem in a hurricane and told me to cut it. I told him I liked it. He said it would scrape the roof if we had one. We didn't. I won ;) And, the jalousies that would let way too much air in and way too much air out. They did.. winters were wonderfully cool and summers were horribly hot. He called it a "Pt. St. Lucie Old Florida house from the 50s" and so it was and I smiled and knew I was taking it.

It has a breeze running through it when you open all the jalousies and it lets light in. You can see down the street and watch the sunrise or look outside through a filtered view of palm fronds. I planted bougainvillea and it just began to flower on the side of the house. There is a coconut palm with real coconuts in the backyard. And, the kids moved the party so that often on the front lawn are parked the fanciest or the bummiest cars. Anything from fixer uppers that can barely drive to Mercedes and Porsche Cayennes. You just never know who is visiting, hanging or spending the night. They go to a private school on a big scholarship, amazes me kids who live in mansions like to hang here. Why? Don't know. It's "the Meyer House" I guess. Good kids, good friends...been some great parties in the great big back yard.

I had boyfriends in the old house. Wonderful boyfriends but no real commitments, no long term I love yous yet lots of love. I am blessed always with good friends and lots of love. Yes, I do say thanks to God often. Here I found love and marriage and met my husband and grew up a little. I was calmer, happier.. more easy going. Not the Cribs kitchen I designed and my landlord put in.. well we designed it together and Lincoln put it in.. backwards once but he redid it. Was the most incredible kitchen, better than Better Homes and Gardens but it was a just a kitchen. This kitchen is nice as well... just not worthy of being on TV. Well..we won't go there... some TV show somewhere I imagine.

And... we never had a hurricane in this house. Lots of rain, storms and sunny weather. The other house saw us through Katrina and Wilma and near misses by Georges and a lightning strike so close that my ears rang.

We moved into this house when the roof still leaked from the Hurricanes of 2005 but well..that roof leaked also lol. And, I trusted him to fix it as he promised. One daughter moved out, one moved in. My married kids left and took the dog with them :( and it's been a nonstop, fast moving three years and now it is almost over.

There will be no more "Meyer House" in Miami or North Miami Beach though there is a luxury loft in Aventura that will see a lot more action it seems.

And, I am packing up this house, box by box, paper by paper, gift by gift from unseen friends who have already sent gifts to the new house. I wonder if anyone even knows what things have been saved over time that I must go through and discard and remember while moving out of this house. It's like walking through the scripts of a thousand unwritten movies and a few that were even made. It's like watching your life in 3/4 time go by and I am now sure if your life does pass before your eyes .. I now know what I will remember. I will remember my kids, my boyfriends... and the love they passed around. I will remember a man who came into my life for a day and stayed a little longer and his memory makes me smile always. I will remember a guy who wanted to date me for 7 years because he saw me dancing once and when he heard I was single, came over and saw me drive up with Sharon and got out of his car, ran over ...grabbed my groceries and took them in the house. Nice pick up line.. I will remember the best girlfriend a girl can ever have who spent a good month of their life here dressed in some great outfits and often wearing what I now call PF Yellow! Pale yet vibrant :)

I am moving... really moving... not today, not tomorrow but before this hurricane season is over.

What kind of door does that open to change and what change do I really want to make?

Good question.

I want to write and want to dance and want to watch weather. I want to live and laugh and be silly... be me. Be Bobbi.

So... excuse me if I take the time to write a very personal entry in my own diary before moving on to the heart of what this blog is about...weather.

In moving away from Miami I am moving away from The Hurricane Center and friends on Virginia Key and the ability to run over and listen to Bill Gray speak or go out to lunch with a good friend and talk life, talk weather and watch the sun go down over Biscayne Bay. We will still email but it won't be the same. I got an interoffice memo the other day from a friend's email and stared at it thinking .. "ummmmm" and asked him why he sent it. He frowned and said, "his email misses me I guess" or something similar lol. I know, I am still here and yet I miss Miami.

Miami in all her beauty... 6am with the sun rising visible from my porch while I take in the mail or water the plants or clean out a garbage can. Afternoon thunderstorms, flooded streets in May when the rain doesn't stop, lightning storms in June and the possibility of hurricanes in September Remember. Bitching that the jalousies don't close well, that the AC doesn't work and watching the sun set through the jalousies through the filtered green lace of palm fronds out my bedroom window.

Life.. it's about living and about change. If you don't change you become stagnant and you may as well be dead. If something isn't flowing.. it dies.

Time to move on.

I picked the date to move into this house on purpose.. it was my house, my decision. I wanted to be able to look back at May 21st and remember that it was the day I moved into a new house and a new life.

And, it was.. but now.. it's time to move on.. to Salem Woods. Really, no words... names of places in North Carolina.. Lord have mercy, help me.

;)

Found this video.. figures... just shows you the more things change...the more they stay the same. Smiling.. Happy May 21st... Happy Anniversary :)



Always Bobbi