I RECKONED

Guest Post by Chris Wells

Feb 11, 2026

I’m a writer, performer and community leader. My husband, Bobby, is a visual artist. After nearly ten glorious years living and working in the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, NY, we learned that due to impending lead remediation, we’d have to move. At the same time, my then 87-year-old mother grew increasingly isolated in my childhood home in Lancaster, CA. Every time I spoke with her she’d say, “I’ve got to get rid of this house.”

One day while discussing our housing options, Bobby and I looked at each other and said at the same time, “We should go to California.”

We were two gay artists with good taste—flipping houses was our birthright. Our plan was to drive to California, move Mom out, empty the house, put it on the market and sell it ASAP. Hey, we’d be getting away from Upstate New York for the winter, and back in the Hudson Valley in time for spring!

Easy-peasy.

Rani, 2024, Colored Pencil on Colored Paper, 22"x16"

The cross-country drive is one we’ve taken many times since we first met in 2006, and it’s one of my favorite ways to travel. But this time we avoided the antique malls and scenic detours and reached California in five days. I immediately put my mother’s name on the waitlist at Mayflower Gardens, the 55+ community where she had decided to move. Meanwhile, Bobby and I bounced from Airbnbs to hotel rooms to friends’ studios. Then, right after the holidays ended, we got word that Mom’s apartment should be available by the third week of January. I told her the good news and she replied:

“I’m not moving out there.”

How did I not predict this obstacle? The mother obstacle.

We decided to fix the new place up and make it more welcoming to my mother. My niece suggested that Bobby and I move into the apartment. Brilliant idea, on one hand, but my handsome husband and I would be living in a retirement community on the outskirts of my hometown in the Mojave Desert?

We were hemorrhaging money. We were over 55. I swallowed my pride.

The third week of January, 2023, we moved into the Mayflower Gardens. No one batted an eye.

Fascinator, 2023, Colored Pencil on Colored Paper, 22"x16"

We began to set up the apartment with her things. I hung a set of decorative plates in the kitchenette, started bringing over small pieces of furniture.

By deep February, Mom was warming to the idea of moving. We just had to catch her elusive cat, (you can read all about that episode here). Once that was accomplished, we took them both to Mayflower, and Bobby and I moved into my childhood bedroom.

Now we could really get to work.

But fate had other plans—or was it God, or Mother Nature, or some random pagan spirits? Hard to say, but two days after moving Mom out, I awoke to a violent sound from down the hall. I jumped out of bed, ran to her former bedroom and pulled open the door.

A cold wind hit me. In the corner of the room, the ceiling had fallen directly over her old bed. Walking toward it, I could see light through the slats of a massive new hole in the roof. As if the truth were written across that blue sky, I saw too: we weren’t going to leave in a month, we weren’t going to leave in three months. Indeed, our quickie, as-is sale mushroomed into a very complicated, drawn-out renovation, including major construction, insurance hassles, a total cosmetic overhaul, termite abatement, and a complete redo of yard and pool.

Flora, 2024, Colored Pencil on Colored Paper, 22"x16"

But first there was the stuff.

My mom lived in that house for fifty-three years. The place was filled with over 150 photo albums, endless piles of books, closets full of clothes and stuffed animals, dressers crammed with sewing supplies and concert t-shirts, cupboards full of dishes and florist vases.

Those were the tangible items.

See, a lot of sad stuff happened within those walls. This might also have contributed to my delusion that this whole chapter would somehow be easy, or without pain.

My severely mentally ill older brother died in the house after fifteen years of living there with my parents, untreated and violent. My father, who suffered at the hands of my brother, died several years later in that same upstairs bedroom where the ceiling fell in.

The pain of being back in the house where my family had fallen apart, a place I had left long before, determined to build a vital, artistic life and to find community and love, was staggering.

I wondered, “How am I the one cleaning up after everyone?”

Time began to bend – my childhood self emerged from within my adult body. I slept in the room where I slept as a boy, I made meals in the kitchen where my mother made meals for decades, every day I walked through the living room where family holidays were once celebrated.

I caught myself staring at piles of photos, standing before a crowded closet, wondering what to do with the dress shirts and slacks hanging there, discovering a crate of Moto-Cross trophies that my brother won more than fifty years before. What to do with old dumbbells?

And the labor was relentless. While I was carting boxes of stuff out nearly every day, and making friends with the folks who worked the donation area at Goodwill, Bobby was befriending the guy who worked the paint counter at Home Depot, in preparation for painting the entire exterior and interior of the house.

I began to feel like I’d never get away from that house.

Sentinel, 2023, Colored Pencil on Colored Paper, 16"x22"

In October, my friend Karen Hartman announced something called The Hundred Day Reckoning: a Creative Response to Hard Change1. Karen’s a brilliant playwright and teacher, who was instrumental in my becoming a writing teacher. She’s someone I trust and admire, and when I read what the Reckoning was about—processing a difficult chapter through creative prompts and ongoing group support—I thought: this will help me.

I had already begun to write about the house, my family, my brothers, my mother, the things that happened within those walls that never got talked about or faced. But the Reckoning gave me a different container, a way to consider what happened all those years before, and to begin thinking about who we might be once the wreckage was finally cleared.

And that’s the thing about challenging life chapters, the invitation that comes with, should you decide to accept it: rather than sitting idly, watching the shitty situation continue, you might engage with the problem and help transform it into something else–the life you want to be living. That’s what we did.

Bobby and I finished the house. And it sold. We moved home to Woodstock last September, nearly three years after we drove away.

My mom got her money, and my surviving brother, inspired by the work he saw Bobby and me do, offered to move her to live near him in New Mexico. I was out there last month to celebrate her 90th birthday. She’s thriving.

Those essays I began writing about the house and my family I went on to develop further in Erika Schickel’s memoir class, and are the basis of the memoir I’m now preparing to send to my editor. And here’s the best bit of karmic reward: Bobby’s drawing series, which he started in that house in Lancaster, becomes his first New York City solo show on Valentine’s Day at the Kentler International Drawing Center in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Camouflage, 2024, Colored Pencil on Colored Paper, 22"x16"

That house was a reckoning, as was my family’s past. I suppose I’ll be dealing with it for the rest of my life. For now, I feel lighter, and freer than I have in years.

The Hundred Day Reckoning

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