Want What You Have or Not

Daily writing prompt

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

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Here.

It’s not perfect but I gave up envy for Lent. My mother who seemed to me to be more long suffering than content with her lot in life often said, “Want what you have.” This is useful advice since it can be applied to a person, place, or thing. It’s a profound kind of settling, a deep resignation that could manifest depression or serenity. Oddly, my mother had both. She was serene in her depression, almost mystical.

Anyway, about places to live. For a long time, I wanted to live on Lake Superior and I did, parttime at least. And then I fell out of love with living there because the difficulty of it overrode the beauty of it. So, I no longer wanted what I had, but I didn’t want anything else. In other words, I didn’t aspire to a better place, a more beautiful place, more exotic and lovely.

I settled for here. An old house a few blocks from Lake Michigan where lots of people walk by every day and we can have a fulfilling porch life on front and back porches depending on the time of day. I like turning the corner on our street and seeing our lovely sea green lady sitting just so in the middle of the block, arguably the prettiest house in the neighborhood. I love that our back porch has become a place for morning reflection and gentle conversation and that our front porch serves as our cocktail lounge and art studio for a budding artist. That there are smudges of purple and blue and red on the porch floor bothers me not at all – it is washable paint after all, if we ever get around to mopping the porch which seems possible but unlikely.

Here is a very strange photo of here taken by an artist friend who happened by the night we put a broken kitchen chair out at the curb.

Here.