Friday, December 13, 2013

Letting Go: How I learned to lose control in order to find happiness

When my fiancé got an employment offer in his home state of Michigan, we had a surprisingly short discussion before concluding he should take it. After all, he was sick of working on a contract, and he had been searching for a job within a one-hour radius of our townhouse in Charlottesville for almost a year with no results. At the time, Michigan was once again a burgeoning mecca for electrical engineers, an intelligent group of awkward personalities to which my fiancé, who is now my husband, belongs.  The speed with which the resumes he sent to Michigan were returned with offers of interviews and consequent employment was the first of many signposts that brought us up north.  There, his profession was in great demand. In Charlottesville, he could be terminated at any moment, and for no particular reason.
For those and other reasons, the decision to make the move was surprisingly easy. After all, his job would come with health benefits and security. We would be close to his family in Flint. This was important for me, as I had spent all twenty-five years of my own life living no more than three hours from my relatives.  That led us to another motivating factor for the move: by the time we were married, his single salary could support both of us, and children. If the roles were reversed and my fiancé lost his position in Charlottesville, we would be scraping by on my abysmal government pay, especially if I was to give birth to my desired hockey team’s worth of progeny.
Three weeks after receiving the job offer, my fiancé rented a U-Haul, which he filled with only his motorcycle. He splurged on a trailer to tow his prized 1993 Lincoln Town Car, and he drove to Michigan to start his new job. I stayed in our rented, cookie-cutter townhouse in Charlottesville with our dog and worldly possessions until we could find a suitable house up north.
For the first two months, we adjusted to our changing lives.  I planned our April wedding in Virginia Beach and put extra hours into my job with the Army in exchange for leave time. My fiancé drove ninety minutes each way from his mother’s house to get to work. He was understandably the first to get antsy with the state of limbo he was living in. All the driving exhausted him. He told me we needed a house.
The ability to buy a house together was another reason we’d made the decision to move to Michigan. In the economic climate, the cost of a four-bedroom home with ample land in Michigan was equivalent to the cost of a two-bedroom condominium in Charlottesville, or a walk-in-closet with half-bath in Virginia Beach. We wanted a home for the future; for the family we would eventually create. We had seen families squeezed into neighboring townhouses in Charlottesville. They looked uncomfortable and the children had no room to run and play. When walking the dog in our subdivision, we could hear babies crying inside their homes from where we stood on the sidewalk. The possibility of buying real estate in Virginia Beach was simply out of the question.
As soon as I gave my fiancé the green light to get a realtor, our nightly Skype sessions were filled with talk about homes. All night long, we sent each other MLS numbers and hyperlinks to homes around Livingston and Oakland Counties. We discovered the strange things that mattered about our first house. I never knew how important it was for me to have a house that was symmetrical from the outside, a fact I discovered after having an unnecessarily harsh reaction to an old Victorian with an off-center front door that my fiancé loved. That house did not make the cut. I certainly did not expect my fiancé to lobby for a home with at least a four-car garage. When he realized that such a requirement brought our price range up to uncomfortable levels, he backed down to requesting at least two spaces and the possibility to add more in the future. As debating about different homes taught us more about what we both wanted, we came up with a short list of places we’d both like to see. Eventually my husband enlisted his real estate agent to walk him through a handful of those homes that we deemed mutually acceptable.
The problem we ran into like a brick wall was that I would not be able to walk through these houses with my fiancé. Between work and wedding planning and the dog, I couldn’t hop in a car to drive to Michigan on a whim. I certainly couldn’t bring our nervous wreck of a dog on a plane, even if we could afford it. So we went with something we knew and were familiar with: Skype. I knew it was a weak solution, but I trusted that eventually, I would see the house we picked in person before we signed away most of our lives’ savings for a down payment. This, at least, was what I told others when they expressed shock that I, of all people, would essentially let my fiancé pick the home we would buy. But if I didn’t trust him, I would say in response, how could I marry him? Such words of trust were foreign to me, but it felt amazing when I spoke them.
One by one, my fiancé walked me through the houses on Skype, his shaky camera never quite capturing the floor-to-ceiling view of any of the rooms he passed through. It was a horrible way to see a home. I wanted to open each and every closet door to examine the space within. I needed to pull out the kitchen drawers to determine whether or not my myriad kitchen utensils would fit inside them. I wanted to get a good look at the wall colors firsthand to see if I could stand them until we saved up enough money to re-paint them ourselves.  
My fiancé did not share these concerns. I truly believe his biggest care was whether the garage would be large enough. In fact, I would be willing to bet money that the first thing he looked at in each of the houses he visited was the garage. A true Michigan auto fiend, he owns six cars. Inexplicably, three of them are Lincoln Town Cars. At the very minimum, he had to be absolutely certain that our garage could house his prized 2007 Lincoln Town Car and his 1970 Road Runner. He’d have preferred to buy a home with six garage compartments. We actually toured a home in our price range that boasted a six-car garage.  It was stunning from the outside, but the interior layout made no sense. There were two kitchens, but neither was large enough to be functional. There was not a single bathtub in the entire house. (And how, pray tell, does one wash an infant or a toddler in a tiny shower?) We went so far as to ask a contractor how much it would cost to convert the house into something we could use. That, we found, would put it out of our price range. Begrudgingly, my fiancé moved on. To this day, he wistfully asks “what if” questions about the “Grass Lake House.” I still wonder whether he’d have preferred it to the home we now own, but I know better than to ask. The truth can hurt.
My fiancé's tours of properties were always too brief. By the time he called me on Skype, he had already examined the house with the realtor, so he would breeze through rooms and tell me what he thought of the spaces.  However short the tours were, they were long enough for us to decide we were not interested in any of the houses we saw. They were too big, too small, or too cluttered. They were obvious money pits, or they were situated off of dirt roads which would cover our cars in a thick layer of mud or dust, weather depending. Despite the beauty of the pictures we’d seen of all of these houses online (ah, the wonders of the fisheye lens), each house was more disappointing than the last. My fiancé was impatient, and I was disheartened.
The disappointment was only temporary. We were determined that we would not be bested by our search for our home, so we widened our search area. Now, we were looking at homes within forty-five of my fiancé’s place of work. The far reaches of Livingston County and even the outskirts of Genesee County became fair game and, as such, our search windows were flooded with twice as many houses.
As soon as we saw the pictures of the off-white colonial with cornflower blue shutters, which was wrapped around the front in a neat white porch, we both fell in love.  The house was in a tiny rural village called Pinckney, just a blip on the map between the college town of Ann Arbor and the small suburban outcropping of Brighton. There were shops nearby: a grocery store and a few gas stations. There was even a private Catholic school, to which I was certain our brilliant children-to-be would be accepted on hockey scholarships.
When my fiancé showed up at the cornflower and cream house, he did his standard walk-through with the realtor. Then he called me with rare excitement in his voice. “You’re going to love it,” he said. And love it I did.
The house was compact, its walls warm shades of pinks, taupes and blues. It had a beautiful finished basement, and two main floors with plenty of space for visitors and our future offspring. The best part, strangely, was the golden blonde wood trim that surrounded every door and window. It was exactly the same trim that abounded in the house in which I grew up, many miles away in Virginia Beach. For all the apathy I felt about the other houses we had seen, I felt a heightened sense of attachment to the Pinckney house. I knew this spacious, blonde wood masterpiece, with its long porch and granite and stainless steel kitchen, had to be mine. My fiancé agreed, and after another amazingly short discussion, we made our offer the next day.
Our realtor, the owners, and another phantom set of prospective buyers battled over our offer for a handful of days. I have never felt more nervous. I was sure we would lose the bidding war on my house, so I did everything I could think of to secure the deal. I even wrote a heartfelt letter to the owners to explain to them how much I loved their beautiful home and wanted – no, needed – to raise the family I was longing to have there.
As it turns out, the homeowners never received my letter, but we did win the bidding war.  I can think of only a few moments in my life when I was so happy as when we became homeowners. Even the terror of being chained and locked in to a mortgage for the rest of our foreseeable futures couldn’t eliminate the excitement I felt about starting our life together in this new place.
That was when the true disbelief set in. We bought a house together, and I had still not seen the inside. I had trusted my fiancé entirely from the grainy screenshots and five-minute Skype walkthrough he provided. For the first time in my controlling life, I was astoundingly not nervous that I had let someone else make such a large decision for me. I knew deep down in my gut that the house was and would be perfect for us. My fiancé knew me better than I knew myself. I trusted that he had chosen well.
A week after our closing date, my fiancé flew to Virginia and we made the ten-hour drive to our new home. He drove another U-Haul, every square inch of this one packed with all the furniture and knick knacks we had accumulated in the last two years. Behind him, I drove my Challenger, just as full with my most prized possessions and a very car-sick and anxious dog. After a long day of driving through a horrific east coast storm system, we turned right into a tranquil Michigan neighborhood full of life-sized gingerbread houses painted the colors of pastel candies. It was as if we had entered Oz itself. The neighborhood took my breath away. Before I knew it, the U-Haul made a left into a long driveway and I followed suit. When I got out of the car, I stared at the massive house in front of me in awe. It had looked so much smaller in the pictures.
The same feeling of awe struck me like a hammer to the head when I walked into the front foyer. What had appeared to be such a small and cozy home was truly gigantic. The realtor had obviously not made appropriate use of his fish eye lens. Empty of furniture, the house appeared enormous and consuming. Even the ceilings were higher than I had expected. I was reeling with disbelief at the masterpiece my fiancé had found for us. I spent the rest of the evening giddy as a schoolgirl as I raced from room to room and imagined what I would do with all the new spaces.
At the time, it was late October and already, nearly the entire acre of our new front and backyards was consumed by dropped leaves. We stared at them over breakfast the next day, wondering how we would ever get rid of all the mess. Later that afternoon, we started the arduous process of uncovering the lawn in our backyard. The next day, while my fiancé was at work, I spent three hours continuing the work of piling leaves. I had moved the mass of dead plant material another ten feet from the house by creating a forty-foot-long pile that hit me at my waist. I searched in the garage in vain for a box of clear leaf bags, my only known method of leaf removal. In Virginia Beach, we scooped our small piles of leaves into large clear bags, which in turn we drug out to the curb where they would be collected by city personnel. This, I have now learned, does not happen where we live in Pinckney.
When my fiancé came home from work that day, he discovered me red-faced and frustrated, trying to move a half-acre of backyard leaves into one massive pile. He actually laughed out loud. “Why didn’t you get the tarp?” he asked. The tarp? He had mentioned something about a tarp before but the idea made no sense. What good would a tarp do to bag leaves, especially when there were no bags? I was angry and indignant. He brushed off my misdirected fury and went into the garage. A few minutes later, he returned with a large tarp, which he spread on the ground beside the massive pile. With my rake, he pushed mounds of leaves onto the flattened tarp until they were stacked to his own waist. I watched in awe as he pulled the laden tarp to the end of our backyard, which abuts a small forest. After shoving the leaves off the tarp, he brought it back. “See? It‘s much easier than bagging the leaves.”
I’m still not sure that I buy his rationale. That tarp gets heavy, and the process is exhausting. It also entails walking into woods that probably contain snakes. Admittedly, I have no evidence to support that belief, but it seems highly plausible. I wear my hiking boots when I am forced to venture past our property line. They hit my ankles, which I have heard is an important place to have covered in the unfortunate event of stepping upon a snake.
Another concern I have is that, within five years of dumping dead leaves, we will have created a small mountain in the forest made entirely of flammable dead leaves. But this is how we do things in Pinckney, where I have learned to fit in rather than rock the proverbial pontoon.
It was a long time before I saw our house again. For most of the next six months, I poured myself into work. I felt a huge amount of guilt about leaving my job, and I wanted to start and finish all of the projects I could before I quit. I worked weekends and extra hours. I would have taken work home if they had let me. My cubicle came to feel like my home. I kept food in my drawers, and extra sets of shoes and suit jackets in a cabinet near my desk. I spent more time in my swiveling chair, colored with an embarrassingly-situated highlighter stain made by my predecessor, than in my bed. I was a better worker in my last six months on the job than I had been for the previous two years. I would have never guessed that guilt would be a more effective fuel than the prospect of continuous paychecks.
When I wasn’t working, I retreated to the small room I rented in a friend’s house. There, I spent hours planning my fiancé’s and my wedding. I was absorbed with the invitation spreadsheets, the seating chart, and all the other menial details of wedding planning that I didn’t feel I could trust to anyone else. I was become so effective at handling everything that I didn’t notice my need to control creeping out of control.  
By the time I left my job in April, I had built myself so firmly into my position at work that I felt empty without a tiny grey cubicle to call my own.  The emptiness did not last for long. The wallowing on my drive from Charlottesville to my temporary home at my father’s house in Virginia Beach was interrupted by a stop in Newport News for a final meeting with our wedding photographer.
For the next three weeks, I was a wedding machine. I motored around from appointment to appointment, signing last-minute contracts with our venue and our cake maker, having my hair and makeup trial, and even getting an unhealthy tan to offset my pasty, cubicle-dweller whiteness. In between these outings, I spread ten cubic feet of mulch around my father’s house and planted dozens of dahlias and petunias to make it beautiful for the rehearsal dinner we were hosting there. Old neighbors came to visit and gawk at the work I was doing. The sweaty, newly-returned, recently-unemployed, and soon-to-be-wed daughter of my father was a sight to be seen. I was surprised at how well I handled the task of turning into a landscaper after years of typing at a computer.
All of these tasks left me with no free time for contemplating the fact that I had divested myself of the job which gave me an intoxicating sense of self-worth.
My fiancé and I married. My husband and I honeymooned. Before I knew it, we were driving back across the country to move into our house together.
For more reasons than I could name, I was terrified. My husband has since pointed out that I claim to feel this way about everything. Before he mentioned it, I never noticed how often I use the word “terrified” in my everyday speech. It happens, on average, four to five times a week. Now, we both smirk when the word crosses my lips. As a control freak, I am terrified of everything I cannot affect: the weather, other drivers, the prospect of upsetting my friends and family, roller coasters, and all things unknown. That made the move to Michigan a veritable hurricane of things I could be terrified of. For the first time in my adult life, I was going to be unemployed. We would be living in a massive house with only my husband’s paycheck to sustain us, and the thought of being a financial burden on someone was – you guessed it – terrifying. My pride and joy, my rear-wheel-drive muscle car, wouldn’t do well on the roads in the storied long, harsh, icy and snowy Michigan winters I had been warned of. In fact, I had no idea how to drive in snow, rear-wheel-drive vehicle or otherwise. That particular concern branched inexplicably into a fear of my husband, the best albeit scariest driver I know, driving to work in the snow and ice and dark - and just plain driving in general. For the months leading up to and following our wedding, it was rare for me to go a night without having a nightmare about one of the many things I feared and which I could not control. Mostly, I feared being bored and useless, and I was worried I would hate Michigan when the winter came.
Needless to say, there was little time to be bored when I first moved in to our house. There were gifts to find homes for and my things to unpack. There were hundreds of thank-you notes to write and plenty of meals to make. I finished these tasks with superhuman speed because if I had taught myself anything in the last six months, it was that resting was a sign of weakness.
During the times when I had to pause to take the dog outside or walk to my car to go get groceries, I surveyed the acre of land surrounding our house. Our yard had been beautiful in October, even when it was covered in dead leaves. Now that summer had arrived, it was nothing short of heavenly. Everything was green and blooming. Hostas were popping up in places that had previously appeared to be nothing but mounds of dirt and mulch. Daylilies were sprouting all along our front beds. The sprouting things gave me a reason to stop moving, if just for a moment, and enjoy the splendor of the waking world.
After the thank-you notes were sent and the wedding china was housed, I found other ways to occupy my time. I did all the things I had only dreamed of during all the months of devoting my life to my job. I planted a garden on our back porch, the only place in the backyard which gets enough sunlight to satisfy hearty vegetation. In large plastic pots, I planted tomatoes, peppers, beans, basil, marigolds, rosemary, mint and thyme. I planted rows of pumpkin vines around our front porch, which I decorated with tall planters full of dusty miller and red and white petunias. I mixed homemade fertilizer from egg shells and coffee ground left over from my husband’s breakfasts and dug and churned it into the rich dirt that fed the roots of my plants.  Every day, I religiously stuck my feet into my rain boots and filled my large copper watering can to douse my crops.
To fill the rest of the long days, I took my love for cooking to a new level. I made meals that took all day long to assemble and puree and simmer. They tasted better than anything I’d ever thrown together in under an hour. We bought a chest freezer, and it quickly went from being empty to completely full of frozen produce and homemade meals. I learned the art of canning, and eventually filled our basement shelves with every kind of jam, jelly, preserve, hot sauce, salsa and fruit butter I could find a tested recipe for. We bought a food dehydrator, and I turned bushels of fresh fruit into dried bits and pieces that I then used for the most delicious homemade granola I have ever eaten.
And after a few months of non-stop action, I gave myself license to take a short break. I re-read the books I had loved in high school and college, sometimes on the porch with a cold beer, and other times in bed, where I would end up taking a much-needed nap. The more I read, the more I started to become a human again. I let myself feel things that were not the rush and bustle I had imposed upon myself. My soul exhaled in gladness as I allowed it more space in my body. I bought a library card and interacted with human beings who also inhabited the tiny village of Pinckney.
There is a half-moon picture window in our second-story master bathroom. It hangs above the ancient, hard-water-stained Jacuzzi tub, and at its base it is nearly as long as my arm span. In early May, the view from our picture window was of our green expanse of backyard. The yard itself is not open and lush like the yard of my childhood. It is broken up by hordes of massive, thick and exceedingly tall trees which sometimes sway if there is a very strong wind. From the half-moon of glass, I could see a plethora of leaves of all shapes, sizes and shades of green that hung on the branches of hundreds of trees in our backyard and in the forest beyond. The leaves were so thick that they completely blocked out the sky. The sun only came through as a haze of green-tinted slivers of light that made the entire picture look stunning.  Sometimes, I would catch sight of the trees blown into motion by a gust of wind. Their leaves would shake and the view of their dark, glossy tops dancing around and exposing the lighter green fuzziness of their underbellies would appear as a kind of green noise that played exciting games with my vision. I had never seen anything so beautiful.
All this time, I had been looking in earnest for a job. Despite my desperate searching, there was nothing around Pinckney that fit with my career expertise. I knew this would be an issue when we made the move, but I assumed I would eventually find something that I might enjoy. Instead, I was faced with the unfortunate choice of starting over in a career field that did not interest me, or staying home.  I lamented my unemployment nearly every night to my exhausted husband when he came home from working his sixty-hour weeks. After a few months, I grew sick of complaining and sick of the search. I informed my husband I had decided that I was going to get good at being a housewife.  “Okay," he said. "But you already are. You get up every morning to make me breakfast. You keep the house clean, you make me lunch and dinner. You take care of the dog, you plant things.” He was right, I did all those things. And I enjoyed doing them. But something was not right. Something was missing. My brain felt lazy.
One day, while I was looking for the final piece of paper I needed to legally change my last name, I stumbled on a notebook that I had locked away for safekeeping. Inside were all the notes I had written about a novel I once planned to write. For fear it would be insipid and meaningless, I had temporarily given up on the novel and stowed away my notes in a lock box.
It had been more than a year since the idea for the novel had struck. When I opened my notebook again and sifted through its pages, I realized that some of the words and thoughts I had scribbled down were worthwhile. If nothing else, they persuaded me to give the novel a second chance. And since I had no career prospects, I felt I had nothing to lose.
As soon as the novel bug bit me, I was unstoppable. By July, I was writing every day in our newly-renovated study. The room was full of beautiful, new-to-us hardwood shelves that housed our multitude of books. It boasted a massive L-shaped desk we found on Craigslist, atop which my husband put his brand new computer monitor. The steel blue walls were hung with intricate silver wall sconces (a stunning wedding gift from grandparents), our diplomas and the framed medals and accolades of my previous career. But the study was a room that was more for show than for work. It was poorly lit and much too big for little me. The stuffy and formal relics that surrounded me dried up my creative juices. I still do not know whether the worst offender was the array of honors from my previous job, which seemed to mock my new enterprise rather than make me feel accomplished, or my husband’s large computer monitor, which made it far too easy for me to focus on things that were not writing. The monitor was probably worse. It sucked me in to Youtube videos and Hulu and seasons of the Tudors which I had watched and re-watched more times than I care to admit. After a few weeks of fruitless labor, I had to move out of the study because I knew nothing good could be written there.
The next place I tried was the small room on the second story that I affectionately named the crib room.  The crib room, so named because it is only large enough to house a child’s crib, is attached to the master bedroom by way of an oak door, and it overlooks the front stoop. It also has the tallest window in the front of the house, and as such it gets more light than any of the rooms in the house. The crib room was cozy and petite. Its light yellow walls made me feel happy and they surrounded me like a glove as I began the painful labor on my novel. I did my best work here. The crib room was where I finally decided I would allow myself to be happy in spite of being unemployed.
Every day, I wrote or I edited. I had always been a vicious editor for my colleagues’ writing, and it didn’t take much for me to turn that skill loose on my own handiwork. I flayed my words if they didn’t impart the ethereal sense of beauty and emotion I wanted them to. Piece by piece, the book finally became something real. But by the time I hit 100,000 words (the prescribed length for most novels), I magically stopped caring whether my book would ever be finished, much less published.
When I brought that concern to my husband, he convinced me that, if I enjoyed writing, it did not matter whether my work ever made money. It was enough for him that I was happy. I told him that if he was sure he didn’t care that I might never bring in any cash flow,  then I would be satisfied to write and be his wife. He said that yes, he was sure.
So happy I finally was. Things fell into place when I realized that I could write, cook, clean and harvest, and be the kind of wife I knew my husband deserved. But always looming in the background was the one fear I had yet to conquer: my fear of the impending death of summer and the onset of the grueling and harsh Michigan winter. I steeled myself against that terror by pretending that it wouldn’t come, but eventually, the reality was inevitable.
In September, the trees surrounding our house began, one by one, to turn colors. The first traitor was a thick, hulking tree behind our back porch whose gigantic, boat-shaped leaves had suddenly become a sunny shade of banana yellow. It was startlingly beautiful. Next, the trees that I could see from the window in the crib room began to sport bits of crimson. Days later, their branches burst into bright red flames. Michigan put on a show for me as it changed seasons, and I watched in awe. I had never seen anything so beautiful.
It wasn’t long before the vibrant, multi-colored foliage turned to burnt sepia and fell to the ground. Once again, we were faced with the conundrum of the piles of dead leaves.  The man who cut our lawn would relieve us of them, but for a hefty fee. Instead, we blew them, then raked them into piles and drug them to the end of the yard on the tarp like old pros. We had gotten good at this tarp game.
Meanwhile, my garden died, and I drug a parade of pots sporting dead branches to the back of our yard. There I discarded mounds of hand-tilled, homemade fertilizer and the clumps of dried-out soil that had taken the shape of their vessels.  We covered the dead plants with leaves so I did not have to see their carcasses every day. After all, I had cared for them tenderly, and seeing them dead was another reminder of what was to come.
Then it happened: our first snow. It was early November and unseasonably cold. My husband came home early to have our sprinklers blown out so that the underground pipes would not freeze during the winter. The sprinkler maintenance man had just left when the first feather-light flakes began to fall from the sky, and within a few hours, they had coated the ground in half an inch of bright white snow. As the sun set, the white snow outside took on a blue glow that imparted upon me an unexpected haze of tranquility. I had never seen anything so beautiful.
The snow has been coming and going now for almost a month, and I still find it serene. In Michigan, it is so cold that the snow is more like dust than the sloshing, wet and dirty mess that is Virginia snow. Nor does it create the level of panic that it might incite in a more southern state. Here, the plows rumble through our streets before the sun rises, and the roads are well-salted to guard against freezing. These things are controlled for me. They happen whether I prepare for them or not, and for that I am thankful.
Now, outside the half-moon picture window in our master bathroom, the trees are stripped of their leaves. Their broad bases rise to spindly and twisted branches across which a few fat and misguided squirrels scamper in search of long-gone acorns. In the afternoon, when all used to appear green-tinged and dark like a secret, I can finally see the glorious silver of the sky unfurling behind our dormant forest. The snow coats the patches of dead grass and mole tunnels in our soft backyard like a gracious pardon. It makes the tree branches sparkle with frozen glitter. Best of all, the sun comes in through that large window and reflects its radiant light across the freshly-shed accumulation. The combination of brilliant light from sun and snow illuminates our house in ways I never imagined possible.  I have never seen anything so beautiful.
It will take me a few months to get used to the numbing cold and the bite of the frozen air that sucks the oxygen from my lungs, but that’s okay. Michigan winters are just one example of the lesson that I see God has used Michigan and my husband to teach me for the last thirteen months:  I should question the things that frighten me. So far, they have been filled with opportunities and sights more exciting and beautiful than anything I have imagined on my own.

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