Lughnasa                                                       Lughnasa Moon

Today I’ve had constant reminders of the physicality of books. They’re wide and their width has to be considered when packing them. Individually, as a rule, books are not heavy, but in the aggregate, they can be very heavy. Art books, printed on paper adequate for taking and retaining high quality color prints, are even heavier and today I have packed box after box of books on aesthetics, modern and contemporary art, art history, Chinese and Japanese art.

Over the course of these months since deciding to move, I’ve often wondered, is the last time I’ll do this in Minnesota? But packing these books, I wondered, am I among the last of those who will pack books for a move? Books are physical objects, present at the human level of perception in the world. The books I read on my kindle though are not physical objects, at least not in this macro sense. I cannot see the individual books, heft them, page through them, smell them.

This bothers some people a great deal, but not me. I’m not a bibliophile. I’m a lover of content and the medium is not so important to me. Reading the physical books is better for scholarly purposes, at least for now. In those books creating marginalia, paging through to a new idea, then back again is all part of the process of learning, at least for those of us who use texts. My guess is that there will come a time, not too long from now, when the readers will be what are often called digital natives. They will demand tools adequate for scholarship on their books of bits and bytes. And they will get them.

Then books will join scrolls and papyri as mediums for containing the word, the word having moved on to other less weighty realms. When I put my kindle in my backpack on that last day headed for Colorado, I’ll have 1,000 books or so along. And they’ll weigh less than a pound.

Summer                                                        New (Lughnasa) Moon

Kate and I went to Keys for breakfast this morning, had our business meeting there. We’ve started tallying the cost of moving, that is, the cost of those things we’ll pay related to getting to Colorado. There’s some yard work, some handyman work, some painting, moving itself of course, but inside that is the cost of moving and storing items during staging the house.

We’ll have art service professionals build wooden crates for the large Jeremiah Miller paintings we own. Each one is 67″ by 68″ with no glass to protect the painting. There’ll be the cost of specialty boxes for the electronics, the other art we have framed and any other items too fragile to trust to the moving company.

There will be, of course, costs associated with buying and selling houses, but that should get covered in the transactions themselves. Then there will be setting up house related expenses in Colorado. Painting, building this or that, fencing, raised beds, that sort of thing.

It will be expensive to move even if we do well on the sale of the house and I’m guessing that we will. Not a surprise. Just important to get all the costs at least estimated so we don’t have any big unexpected costs.

Summer                                                          Most Heat Moon

When we are ready, a house will appear. I believe this. We’ve looked at many, many houses online now. Kate’s visited several parts of Colorado and we’ve narrowed our geographical preference. By the time next February comes, we’ll have clarity about what we want, what we need. The one available at that time, our next house, will emerge out of the clutter of competing listings, we’ll find it. And buy it.

Before that, we finish decluttering this house, getting it ready for the market. We look at our pared down furnishings, get out the tape measure and figure the room we need for our own creative spaces. That will help us decide just how much we need in a new home, or new home plus out buildings.

All of this living in the move means staying in the flow toward Colorado, realizing where the energy naturally goes at this stage and following it. Putting our shoulders behind work at the time it needs to be done means we use the momentum of change to our benefit. Easier than fighting against it, trying to push things to move faster. Then the momentum of change works against us.

We can, now, decide on communities, specific locales like Idaho Springs, Golden, the I-70 corridor. We can, now, pack and declutter, packing those things we won’t use until next year and throwing those things we no longer need. SortTossPack has come once already and they’ll come again, probably around Labor Day. Later in the fall the yard work contractors will prune and mulch, declutter the front.

Kate and I will probably head out to Colorado for Thanksgiving together, so I can drive around with her. We’ll stay two or three nights in Golden, then another two or three in Idaho Springs. Get to know some people. By that time our house should have left, unpacked, only those things we’ll need through the move.

Then, in December or January we’ll finish up the physical modifications that need to get done for staging the house. And we’ll begin actively checking the market in Colorado. Looking for that house that is ready for us.