It’s time.

Nobody really told me about this. Or, if they did, I wasn’t listening. I didn’t hear about it. I just got clobbered by basic pattern recognition enough times for it to sink in.

Here it is:

Life is Revisions. It’s all a do-over, but not with your feet in the same river. You never step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus said. You can’t. The water kept flowing while you were dithering about, trying to decide whether or not you wanted to get your feet wet again. And you’re not the same you either. You’re the you that you are right now, not the you that you were at the last time of the wetting of your various toes and bunions.

This is a revision. A seeing again. A re-vision.

And it’s a rewrite. You don’t just see differently at this time of stepping into the river. You step differently too. You act differently. You breathe differently, scenting the air like a curious hound or blowing out the blockages into a tissue as if recovering from an infection – either way – you breathe differently when you take that deep breath this time and step back into the waters.

Lofty metaphors this morning, apparently. My apologies. It’s how I get ready to take a step.

Out of the clouds and down here in reality, this business of beginning again feels a lot more like picking up Lego bricks in a neglected room. At first, you can’t even use a vacuum because you might accidentally suck up a brick, so you step carefully, carefully, carefully, carrying the bright blue square bucket with you as you go, blowing the dust or crumbs from the yellow and red and blue surfaces before you drop them onto the bright colors in the bucket, flapping the green flat pieces with the brick houses and gardens still attached to clean them a little, pausing to take the little bricks off the big one (the big one doesn’t fit in the bucket), and trying and trying not to step on any of those sneaky little white cubes. How is something so small capable of being in exactly the right place so as to cripple you instantly if you put your foot down? And why on earth did you ever allow the dumping of a bucket of Legos onto a shag rug?

One of the stories my family tells – especially my older sister, still, even after all these years – is about the era when my brother-in-law was first spending time with our family, in our house, joining in as her boyfriend. I was 11. I had recently learned a double-fast card game that entailed verbal identification of the speeding cards. And because the testing of my double-fast brain was and is more fun than anything else in the universe, and because I was (and now try not to be) a real pill who, at the time, resented this interloper’s absconding with my sister, and because I knew how (and still know, but refuse) to exploit the weakness of another, and (God forgive me) because I knew he had a stammer, I challenged him to a game. (Why did no one stop me? Why did no one pull me aside and point out that this was a really mean thing to do?)

Inevitably, he goofed it up.

And every time he did, I, sounding like the worst sort of Hermione Granger imitating a starchy Professor McGonagall, I announced at each of his goofs that that card must now go into the “do-over pile.” I did it fast, too. The game didn’t slow down just because he messed it up. In my defense, I said this about the cards, not about the confused but patient 19-year-old attempting to be nice to his girlfriend’s kid sister. (In his defense, I did not say that. I just said, “do over,” and slapped the card into the do-over pile.)

In the retelling, in the years since, in the flowing of the river of time in their house where the girl and the boyfriend have now been married for more than 50 years, for all this time, I found out recently that they have been putting each other in the do-over pile in moments of exasperation. “I’m putting you in the do-over pile,” they say.

And somehow, through the years, their telling of the story has morphed from what I really did (evaluate the skill, find him lacking, and then give him my favorite thing – another chance – honestly, I did – even if I was being snotty about it), and their revisions have turned from what I thought I was doing into what I actually longed for with every fiber of my preadolescent being. I wanted to turn the clock back. I did not want my sister to leave our house. I did not want this gormless driver of The Bug that kept parking in our driveway back in 1971 to be my new brother. I was helpless in the face of it, and I was frustrated, and I was seriously pissed off that any of this was happening. I wanted all of us put into the do-over pile.

Poor kid. That’s not how it works.

There are no Lego bricks on the floors of my house anymore. I think the big blue bucket is in the attic, but I might have given it away by now. My own Lego-building kids are twice as old as the girl and the boyfriend were that evening, and oceans of water have flowed under our bridges. I have worn out many, many decks of cards (but I stopped playing that game of quick-quick and catch-you-out and I have learned to be a little more kind, I hope). I grew up and left home and got married, and my own younger siblings might have been just as frustrated with my passages as I once was with my sister’s, but I was too immersed in my own life then for me to have any memories of it now.

We, my husband and I and the Legos in the bucket, moved a bunch of times over the years. We moved eventually into the house my husband’s great grandfather – a Norseman who had been apprenticed to a ship’s carpenter and sent from home at the age of nine – built with his own two hands. It’s not new, this house. There is no duct work in the walls because there was neither plumbing nor electricity in it when it was built. It’s not weather or critter proof, but it’s more so than it used to be. (There is a mouse in here somewhere. I saw him last night and didn’t try all that hard to capture him. He’s really cute.) This place? It is saturated in memories and lives and days of frustration and happiness and families and births and deaths. Meetings and separations. My husband’s oldest memories are here in these rooms, and there is me, now, alone. I live in this house alone.

This has happened here before. His Great Aunt Nita lived here alone after her brother died.

It helps me to be in this place where all of this has happened before. There might not be toys strewn about, these days, but there are definitely dust bunnies and the need for vacuuming and the long neglect of housekeeping during the decline of my husband’s body, in the grief of our separation when he went into care at the beginning of the year, and my winter of devastation that has followed. Spring passed by. It’s nearly summer again.

Do-over.