Constantchange

Home Dreaming

The Inman Park yearly festival has come and gone again, and this year was the first year I really got to enjoy it the way I'd always wanted. In the past I had always had family or work comittments that either took away my time or made me too tired to go out to see the parade and peek into the homes on the home tour. This year is different, this year is better. This year the husband and I took Dot out in her baby sling and met our friend Amy for lunch, and then we watched the parade.

I love my neighborhood; along with the local High School bands and politicians up for office, my neighborhood has a parade that highlights all the things that make Atlanta great. Marching alongside the conventional parade regulars were drag queens in masses of feathers, Klingons on custom motorbikes, war protesters of various stripes, a Harry Potter fanclub, a mass of neighborhood people dressed as superheroes just because they like superheroes, the local Youth Pride chapter, a crazy man with a placard informing us we were all going to hell, The Queen of Trash who rode atop the local garbage truck (it had been cleaned), The Queen of Little Five (who was massive and elicited reverential bows from the local punks), the local 'Possum Queen atop her opossum-mobile, The Sweet Potato Queen, and a local Homecoming Queen, who was the youngest of all the Queens by a good 30 years.

The husband took the baby home after that so Amy and I could have an afternoon out peeking inside homes open for the home tour. I had to go on the tour this year as a house on Austin/Lake Avenue near where I first rented was up for looking. When I first moved here one front corner of that house was held up by a car jack, and the rest was all crumbling at the edges. Today the house has been totally rebuilt as a dream home. We also took a look in some of the old mansions around the neighborhood. The husband and I joke all the time that we need to win the lottery so we can move three blocks from our warehouse...

It took me three days to get this posted; between breastfeeding and housework, I'm swamped. Happy, tired, and overwhemled, but in a way very different from how I feel when I'm overloaded in my professional work. Working at home is more difficult than working in an office. There is this dream that we all have, a dream of a lovely perfect house from a home tour, sparking clean. In that dream you stay at home all day helping your family and somehow everything is all relaxed. This is not reality. In reality, professional cleaners come and set the stage for those tours. In reality, I've got baby spit-up on me and my laundry isn't folded. In the dream, there are no clothes on the floor and we are all well rested and dinner is cooked every night. But still, I live in best of all real worlds - and soon we will have even more people I love best living near us.