"I mean, I just want things to be settled," I confessed to Uncle Ronnie as I drove his old Ford truck down the long, winding driveway toward the farm house. "That's all I've ever wanted -- to have things settled, you know?"
He nodded, straining to hear the rattling of his niece over that of his Ford.
"When I was a kid, I thought, 'If I can just get graduated, I'd be settled,'" I continued. "Then it was, 'If I can get a job, I'd be settled.' Then, 'If I can just get a house and get married, I'd be settled.' Before I knew it, it was, 'If I can just get out of this house and marriage, Lord, how I'd be settled!'"
A wide grin spread across Uncle Ronnie's face, causing his eyes to disappear atop his rounded cheeks.
"Maybe you're mine after all, girl," he chuckled. "Yes, I know what you're saying. Know it all too well."
"I've thought every house I've ever lived in was going to be my forever home -- that they'd have to carry me out of there in a pine box," I rambled on. "Next thing you know, I'm moving and saying goodbye to the roses and hydrangeas I've tended and thought I'd be enjoying from my rocker when I was 90. It's just, I go into every decision thinking it's permanent, or as permanent as it can be on this side of the dirt, only to find it's not. It or I keep changing. You know?"
"I know," Uncle Ronnie said. "We think if this or that'd happen, then all would be right with the world. Thing is, there's always another somethin'."
Though that conversation took place many years ago, his words rang in my ears during a thunderstorm this weekend as I mopped water from an ever-leaking window.
Settled, I thought to myself. I would have told you I'd grown more mature over the last decade or so. Yet there I was -- wringing towels, paying bills, tripping over laundry and the cat, and gingerly cradling a finger I'd just caught in a door jamb -- considering how nice it would be to have the mortgage paid, the chores done, a cat that isn't touched in the head, a healthy, coordinated body, and windows that didn't leak. Just to have a quiet, steady, BORING life for a while!
The faint sound of a rumbling truck and my uncle's voice came to mind, with his reminder that life isn't a court case or frontier territory. It isn't something to be settled. It could mean one path or a dozen carved from a series of beautiful moments and poor choices and promising futures with new loves and crazy old cats that make us say bad words but that we'd miss if they were gone. For of all the things I'd want to change, I wouldn't change a thing.
Of course, Uncle Ronnie also says if you pee on an electric fence you learn things you don't learn any other way, so what does he know?
NAN Our Town on 10/24/2019