It was insufficient and also more than I had expected. I held both.
The Cumin, as Epilogue
I have mentioned the cumin more than once and I want to explain why, because it might seem like a small thing to keep returning to.
It is a small thing. It is also the most specific version of the larger thing. The larger thing is: who has authority in a space, and how do you know, and what do you do when someone else’s assumption of authority conflicts with yours.
The cumin in the wrong cabinet was not a crisis. It was, in the specific language of patterns, an early indicator — the first clear instance of a decision about my space being made without me that I noticed and named out loud.
There would be more instances. None of them, individually, was devastating. Cumulatively they were the problem. The reorganized pantry and the called plumber and the calendar additions and the Carol-visiting-Saturday and the knock on the closed office door and the dinner schedule and the grocery order and the soup and the my son’s home — together they described a situation where I was living in my house on someone else’s terms, and had been for long enough that the terms were becoming normal.
What changed it was not one dramatic moment. What changed it was a lunch, and a sentence, and a friend asking a question at dinner, and a walk on a cold October morning, and a conversation with a dish towel set down on a counter, and six weeks of a departure date that everyone took seriously, and a counselor’s office on Wednesday evenings.