Category Archives: The Move

Leave the Viking in Minnesota. (seems right, eh?)

November 19, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Samain Closing Moon

Breakfast at Keys, then over to Sears Outlet to talk ourselves out of taking our Viking stove with us. Looked at Warner-Stellian for a bit, stoves like Thermador and Viking are tres expensive! Considering an induction cooktop and a wall mounted electric oven for Black Mountain Drive. The point is we decided to go for more flexibility in Colorado.

Back for an early nap. Then, more packing. I’m really close on the study, but packing the smaller stuff is harder than the books. Books I’ve packed so often that I understand them intuitively. Smaller things I have to think about some, make sure things are secure and don’t rattle around.

Mike the Fence guy called for the code for the garage door. Good idea, but I didn’t know it. So I contacted Ann Beck, the realtor. Turns out I never got the code because it was never activated. Don’t know where Mike’s going to store his concrete now. He’ll have to figure something else out.

Things feel chaotic, not out of control, but easy to tip over in that direction. Then, there’s the I can see the other side from here feeling and things tip back into balance, or as much balance as this part of the move allows.. Shadow Mountain looms closer and closer each day, becomes more tactile.

Colorado, Dogs, The Move

Dog Gone

November 19, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Samain Closing Moon

This day a month from now we’ll be getting ready to collect the dogs from Armstrong Kennels, Kate in the rented cargo van and me in the Rav4. I’ll pick up Vega, Rigel and Kepler while Kate will take Gertie. We’ll drive together to Shorewood where I’ll pick up my co-driver, Tom Crane. Then it will be good-bye to Minnesota.

That thank you for visiting Minnesota sign at the border with Iowa will have a different signification for Kate and me. We’ve lived in the Twin Cities a similar amount of time, Kate coming in 1968 and me in 1971. So, ok, it was a long visit.

Don’t know why I’m writing about this except that the sense of abbreviation to our time here has begun to increase. It has become palpable, as if the future is pressing back against the present, calling us forward. As I wrote a day or so ago, the closest analogy seems to be the anticipation of Christmas for young children. Not so much in the sense of eagerness, though there is that element, but in the way a particular future day and its events can dominate a present moment.

Now even the small world between my desk and my bookcase, punctuated at one end with the computer and at the other by the gas heater, feels impermanent. I can see it stripped down, bare, then gone. That’s new.

More moving business today. Buy a new stove for the kitchen since we’ve decided to take our Viking with us. Take hazardous waste to a dump site. Perhaps deploy the bagster to clear some space in the garage.

Colorado, The Move

Oh.

November 18, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Samain Closing Moon

Packing takes a toll in these last days. Not sure why, but each day I spend a good deal of time packing really wears me out. Not physically, but emotionally. It’s not resistance to the move itself, as I’ve said here before, rather I think it feels as if the packing has gone on too long.

Let me see if I can sort this out. I’ve been packing, with many generous breaks, since May. The bulk of the summer I packed books and sorted files, then packed them. I made an effort to get all the art and objet d’art packed before Labor Day, along with all the books in my study except those I use regularly. That was successful.

We’ve decluttered, thrown away, donated a lot of stuff. Some has gone to recycling. Then there was the search for the house, finding it, my seeing it, then the closing.

You can’t control the Universe. You are the water, not the rock

Living in the move, an idea I developed early on, has helped me see all this as the liminal space between our decision to move and our eventual settling in Colorado. But now living in the move is breaking down as we get close to the actual date. We are now having to live the move itself.

This seems like an understandable, normal response at this point, as I consider it. We’re neither completely finished, nor are we actually moved. So we’ve entered a time when planning and reality are about to collide. A part of me wants to rush through this, get on with it. Why is there this teaware and ceramics to pack? Why are there still these boxes of files to sort? Well, precisely because they are the things I chose to pack last. Oh.

The trick is to just stay in the moment. Let the day’s packing be sufficient there unto.

Art and Culture, Colorado, Friends, The Move

Pickles on a Stick

November 17, 2014 Charles 2 Comments

Samain Closing Moon

Thanks to Allison, Morrie, Sally, Mary, Joan, Wendy, Vicki, Bill, Carol, Antra, Joy, Kathleen, Merritt, Tom, Marcia, Sharon, Cheryl, Ginny, Florence, Carreen, Jane, Lisa for a wonderful, sweet, sad afternoon.

The hot dish, the pickles on a stick, the bundt form jello, the wild rice soup, the selection of desserts and the lefse with butter and sugar, all culinary masterpieces of Minnesota home cooking. There will be nothing like any of this in Colorado, I’m sure.

Friends for life, you all. My time at the museum became a place to see you, catch up on interesting lives and have conversations about art. A good life.

As I said this afternoon, this event was sweet and sad and those two in direct proportion to each other. Very sad, very sweet. Here are a few more pictures taken by Ginny:

a Minnesota memories dish towel

Mary and Tom and the pickle tray

Wendy and Joy

notes from everyone written on the back of these Pre-Raphaelite cards. Antra (on the left) also did the calligraphy for a beautiful card.

Colorado, The Move

Dwindling Resources

November 16, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Samain Closing Moon

The bookcase to my immediate right as I work, the one on which I keep books I refer to often is all but empty. These remain: Wheelock’s Latin Grammar, Anderson, Hill and Lee commentaries on the Metamorphoses, a Loeb’s volume of the Metamorphoses vol. I-VII and a Loeb’s of Caesar’s de Bello Gallico. My computer is still in its usual place, as is the laser jet printer. My desk and its two slanted editing tables are still there, too.

I didn’t get as far in here as I thought I would. Move ennui, a lassitude brought on by too much attention to packing and thoughts of leaving, enveloped me. So I stopped. Still, some progress was made today and I don’t feel the active resistance I did when I made the Whining post.

Here in these pages is a continuous record of the move from its earliest notion to its detailed enactment. Banal to the world at large no doubt but for me and for mine a testament to how we made a major life decision and took action to see it through.

Colorado, The Move

Time Grows Short

November 15, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Samain Closing Moon

One half of my study, all the books and the bookshelves and the art, all packed or stacked. Tomorrow the half closest to my daily work space gets attention. Both Kate and I have a problem now, a similar one. We need to get everything packed up and ready to go. Yes, we do.

But there are elements to our daily lives, her Bernina, the table on which she cuts and layouts out her projects, the ironing board; my computer, the books I use for my Latin, the usb connected accessories that take in the data from my workouts and my sleep that we will want even up to the day we move.

We’ll each have to work that out in our own way. These problems are evidence though of time beginning to grow short. So they are problems of our choosing and ones that show the progress we’ve made.

Colorado, The Move

Deconstruction

November 15, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Samain Closing Moon

Spent the morning in a weird activity. Deconstructing my office. For over 15 years the bookshelves, desk, and computer furniture in this space have supported my idiosyncratic path through the world of the mind. Now half of the room is almost bare, shorn of shelves and their supporting structure. A plastic baggie has two inch metal pegs that hold up the shelves. The shelves themselves, in various sizes, and the the wooden posts that contain the holes for the pegs line up now along the back wall, arranged by size.

It feels like I’m eating my own feet, sort of chomping through my own body from the ground up. And it feels just as unsustainable as this implies. What will I do when all the books and shelves and files and papers are in boxes? What will I do when the computer is unplugged and stowed in its own container? Then, I’ll be cut loose from the mechanical and pulpy tools that have been my workaday world.

It might be liberating for a while, but for good? No. Perhaps these will be the first presents I open on Christmas.

Our Land and Home, The Move

Most Daunting

November 15, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Samain Closing Moon

Key’s is a breakfast joint on University. There are several around the cities. The original is on Raymond Avenue also just off University, but all the way into St. Paul where St. Paul abuts Minneapolis near KSTP. In my working days many plots were hatched over breakfast at the Raymond Avenue Keys.

Now Kate and I have our business meetings there, focused these days on our impending move. A month from today the packers come to finish up the work of getting ready to load. They’ll do the kitchen, the garage and anything else not already boxed.

The list of things to do, once long and overwhelming, has shrunk. There are still plenty of tasks, but they no longer seem overwhelming.

Over dinner Wednesday Tom asked what’s the most daunting thing now in the move. It is, without question, selling this house. Until that’s done our reserve cash is stuck here in Andover, illiquid. We’re relying on Margaret to get the job done.

Colorado, Friends, The Move

The End of the Ending and the Beginning of the Beginning

November 14, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Samain Closing Moon

With our closing Black Mountain Drive on Samain, October 31st and the Celtic New Year, it has meant that the final phases of the move, the last packing, the loading and transport of our household will all happen during Holiseason. Though we made no effort to have things work out this way, from a Great Wheel perspective and on my personal liturgical calendar, it couldn’t have happened better.

By closing on Samain and wrapping up the move in this 6 week season which began on Summer’s End (Samain), it means we will start our new, mountain life in this time of beginnings. It also means that the move will mark a harvest of our Minnesota lives and then a long fallow season, stretching into the next spring. Over that time we will nourish roots tentatively planted in new soil.

Furniture will get positioned. Clothes sorted into closest and drawers. The kitchen will fill up with our dishes, pans and utensils. Rugs will go down. Kate’s Bernina and her long arm quilter and her stash and her ironing board and her work tables will find their positions. Her new sewing room will take shape. The reading chairs will go in front of the fireplace, a new kitchen table, made of wood from pine beetle killed trees, will come into being. My treadmill and weights, computer and work tables, and books will occupy the loft area over the garage.

The dogs will have their places, not yet fully determined, either by them or by us. The Rav4 will have its own bay and the new snow blower will inhabit space in the garage, too.

We will arrive in Colorado during Advent and in the middle of Hanukkah. Winter solstice 2014 will find us on Shadow Mountain with a non-light polluted view of the longest night’s sky.

Our movers project December 21st to December 24 for delivery. Christmas day we will be opening boxes filled with materials we use to live our life. What better presents? Over those final, often dismal days at the end of the year, we will be moving in. And on New Years we can have a party of our own, as we always do, a quiet evening to mark the coming of 2015.

Over these Holiseason days, which come to an end on Epiphany, January 6th, the grandkids and Jon and Jen and Barb will come over. We will eat meals together and begin to adjust to this new, closer to each other, reality. Actually, as I write this, it occurs to me that Holiseason will extend well into January with the coming of the National Western Stock Show. This event has been an annual trip to Colorado since Ruth was 3 and is a celebration of things Western and ranch.

There will also be new people to meet. Perhaps through the sheepshead meet-up group, quilting retreats, the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Colorado Beekeepers Association. At restaurants and service locations like the Colorado Toyota Service center. In ways we do not yet know.

All this over the dark, cold, snowy time so that in the spring or early summer perhaps, we can emerge with our new life ready to bloom, to sink roots deeper and to enjoy the mountain summer.

Colorado, Feelings, Friends, The Move

A Sweet, Sad Thing

November 13, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Samain Closing Moon

It is a sweet sad thing, this leaving. Tonight before sheepshead Bill Schmidt and I ate supper at the St. Clair Broiler. the last such meal before our monthly card game. We’ve played cards 60 different times over a period of 8 years. That’s a long time. Bill and I have eaten together most card nights for the last couple of years.

We ate, talked of his daughter, his grandchildren. He gave me a gift, a CD, a Celtic Thunder Christmas. It has two songs on it with a distinctly Celtic (Irish) flavor and the rest is well-done versions of various Christmas standards. But it was not the music so much, he said, but the idea of holidays and Celtic and Christian together, all part of my way: holiseason, long years in the Christian ministry and a now long standing immersion in Celtic sensibilities about the land, the nature of time and joy, life and death.

At the game tonight, which did not go well from a score keeping vantage point for either Bill or me, we played with a sense of ending. Dick, Roy and Ed had not been caught up on our purchase in Conifer, nor, really, our reasons for leaving. We spoke of them.

At the end of the evening Judy made an apple crisp that was delightful, Roy had written a closing piece that would be a good eulogy and Dick Rice gave me a t-shirt with the Celtic triskelion and the sacred raven. I was told I would I would be missed and felt it.

As I said in my post from last night, I am a rich man. Yet, it is this richness that makes leaving sad, and, the leave takings themselves, also sweet. And, precious.