I am feeling chastised by my tea bags.

The latest one says, "The unknown is where all outcomes are possible; enter it with grace." Inside my head, the tea bag says this in an exasperated voice, more like: "For god's sake, try to enter it with some fucking grace, unlike your usual pathetic MO." So here, on the precipice of this big life transition into the unknown, I am trying to muster some fucking grace.

This mostly involves keeping the plants watered and eating things other than tortilla chips. Sometimes. Last week I ate some raspberry sorbet, which I feel is a more graceful thing to eat than queso dip straight out of the jar with a spoon. 

I realize that the tea bag is not meant to be censorious and that my reading of it is entirely about my own longstanding feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy. But the demands of the moment do not exactly make adequacy easy to achieve.

The contractors are here working on the basement all week and my finished manuscript is due at the publishers on Friday. I am in the footnotes/bibliography/permissions phase and have been for several days now. It never occurred to me that The Chicago Manual of Style would ever come to play such a large part of my emotional life. But here we are.

I have typed the sentence "I am in footnote hell" into a few emails. Scarily, this had led the data-mining algorithm that rules our lives to switch all the ads I get on YouTube. They used to be dominated by ads for Vrbo vacation homes. Now they are almost all suicide prevention/counseling/antidepressant ads. This, I think, is going too far. While figuring out how to get permission to reprint text from a now-defunct one-off 1937 magazine is tedious, I'm not going to kill myself over it. Not while I still have all these tortilla chips to eat.

The landscapers have come and gone, taming our overgrown jungle, once so wild and tangled. Now it is a tidy and respectable yard that any normal person would be pleased to have.

"I hope you get a chance to enjoy it some before you leave," the head landscaper said on his way out.

"It looks great!" I said. I did not say that I had enjoyed it the way it was before or that I had always thought there was something magical about the jungle. I did not say that the wildness was on purpose.

When I first moved into this house, I painted a poem on the ceiling of my bedroom with green paint. It was nice to have poetry to read in the night when the babies were at last asleep and I could hear the sounds of the trains when they came through town in the dark and the quiet.

It was a long poem and it took me two days to paint it. It is surprisingly hard to look straight up for two days. At the end of all that time balanced on a step-ladder with my head bent back, a paintbrush in one hand and a can of paint in the other, I had a newfound respect for Michelangelo. Painting just one poem on a ceiling almost permanently debilitated me. The Sistine Chapel must have been a bitch. But it was worth it for the poetry in the night.

Then, when we moved back into this house after our two-year Swiss sojourn, the movers who were carrying our boxes in assumed that we were new to the house. One of them saw the poem.

"Jeez," he said, scowling and perplexed. "Did ya buy this place from some Satan worshippers or something? There's a poem on the ceiling in there!"

I didn't tell him that I had painted it myself, that I had always thought there was something magical in it, that the poetry was on purpose. The Devil apparently speaks in rhymes -- the better to beguile us, I guess.

But the poem is gone now, too. Anyone normal would be happy to have this house.