Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

This week marked an important milestone for me – I got myself back home two years ago after six months of being homeless. That was March 10, 2024.

It’s legal, but tenuous. So I began to wonder – am I still homeless? I’ve lived here since July 18, 2005. That’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere even my childhood home.

These walls hold all my stories, these floors supported me through thick and thin. So much of how I evolved from that 34 year old young woman in love and so hopeful into a person with much less love to surround me.

This home remembers the love, wrapping me in a cocoon of what used to be, what I deserved. Cocoon are not forever. They cradle and comfort, nuture and nudge us to take flight.

This home rebuilt itself – new roof, new paint inside and out, new windows and doors, and a very complicated situationship with the deck. We put up fences, planted tulips, and managed to keep a very old rusted shed serviceable. Structural and surface weaknesses were addressed, resolved, and most of all, acknowledged.

Last week the appliance repairer came to fix the dryer. It’s over 20 years old. Over the years, he’s replaced every part and believes it could last forever with routine maintenance. When it gives up the ghost, most of it can be recycled a dignified transition for this machine that served well.

If only that were true for all of us … some things last forever, others break down no matter how much duct tape and ‘creative engineering’ we use.

I’m now roaming these halls focused on the immediate future. I see no options for the down-the-road future. I’ll be poor and permanently dependent on others. I have no housing options.

Still, I distinguish between needing housing and my bonds to my home.

The court sees this strictly as an asset, property not a home. Family court cannot ensure all parties in a divorce have housing or health insurance or really anything beyond $$. Obviously, most of us wouldn’t know this until we experience it. I’m still struggling to understand how a court that has a specific housing court doesn’t have the capacity to prevent anyone from losing their housing.

Then again, I’m still befuddled that no one at the Court could give me a key to my own home. This is a complicated entity.

I can’t make any plans until things are settled because I don’t know what my income will be. I can try to plan for an array of scenarios, but that’s not soothing. So in terms of being housed, everything is up in the air.

I think people expect my friends to take me in and support me. That’s not realistic or fair. They have no obligation to do so. They don’t have the means to do so. No one has a spare bedroom or a garage apartment. And I shouldn’t have to explain that, to rationalize why they can’t help me. Shifting me around like an unwanted spinster aunt is fine for Austen novels, not so much real life.

But for my home, oh I love this home. I love the view out over the backyard to the West End bridge. My feet know the height and depth of the steps on each stairway from decades of tromping up and down with my arms full. I automatically know the downward step to the bathroom even in the darkest morning hours when I am groggy with sleep and don’t want to turn on the lights to disturb anyone.

I love watching the cats zoom from basement to attic and back again. The way the house feels during a thunderstorm, snug close to houses on either side, but charged with energy. I love all the memories – countless house in the bathroom with new foster kittens, sitting at the kitchen table with friends, the parties in our younger days, the sounds made my the dogs, the occasional laughter of children, the look of awe when people see the tin ceiling and comment on the house’s story, the sense of security and comfort, the intimacy, the safety.

I see the corner where we put up the kitten tent, I look down at the corner of my wardrobe where the cat Tabby (her name) crawled in to escape the bully cats. The cacophony of mixing our dishes and plates and cookware. Knowing intuitively where a certain rarely used kitchen item was stowed. The pile of user manuals for everything we ever bought. The unspoken decision to just use seasonal hand towels on a year round basis for whimsy and practicality. Using a hot knife to get the bottom drawer in the fridge to open. Running down the stairs where I can juussssstt reach the beeping smoke detector. When we had a radio in every room. The dog crates in the basement until the dogs passed on. The cozy feeling of my corner of the sofa.

Resetting the FIOS box a thousand times. The useless but gorgeous fireplace. The rich color of the walls repainted at the tail end of an epidemic, like a fresh start. A dustpan and broom on every level, two vacuums. The luxurious clink of the ice maker. Taking off shoes at the door (even though it gave me plantar fasciatis) and the pleasure of sliding into slippers to go about the evening. Piles of books, CDs, and old magazines from times gone by. The distinct click of the interior front door opening with the air pressure. The sparkle when the sunlight hits a transom. Figuring out how to reset the window sash during a rainstorm with the power out.

All of those sights, sounds, scents, and the tears, too, make up this home’s story. Smoke alarm chirps, birds singing, cat hair sprinkled on everything, cursing while fixing things, constantly searching for batteries and light bulbs, the grit from the basement walls, the cobwebs in the attic, the stair railing that jiggles just a little bit, little snippets of conversation as people walk past the window. The sculpture in the backyard next to an unused compost big and a broken wheelbarrow. The grill that serves as a cat tree for the ferals. The living trees that died and had to come down. Being started when the mail slot opens, no matter how often I’ve heard it. The tulips that bloom each spring.

I’m still in awe of a trashcan hidden in a drawer of the cabinets. Counter space. The raw beauty of window ledges installed before I was and never painted or finished. My grandmother’s rocking chair. The coat rack crafted from a former bowling alley lane. The very first thing we ever bought together (IKEA book rack) and failed to assemble, forced to step around it for a week until our rescuer could stop by. I’m looking at it now, crammed with books and music, toys, trinkets, and pieces of our individual and shared memories. The spot for the annual cat calendar. The perpetual lack of electrical outlets and the frustration of light bulbs in a ‘high-ceiling’ home.

It is not an asset, it is everything.