Category Archives: The Move

Colorado, The Move

Books. Most now in boxes.

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Lughnasa                                                                                     College Moon

The last bookcases. That’s where the packing has gone. Now China and Cambodia and the West and Emerson goes in boxes. Green tape boxes. More China, then onto the Celts and the Greeks, philosophy, American history, fairy tales.

Just moved the last gathering of liquor store boxes needed for books. Kate gets them, I unload them, then fill’em up, tape’m and stack’em. Objet d’art are on the now empty bookshelves in the larger basement area. Before Sort/Toss/Pack comes near the end of September, they’ll get sorted on a love it or leave it basis. Gotta cut them down, too.

We’re looking at the overall budget for the move now, preparing for a meeting with a financial consultant. Gonna take a dent out all round, but we’ll have plenty.

We’ve been fortunate, with Kate’s good earning capacity, and smart. We have enough and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. Still, you’d have to climb further up the wealth ladder to get to can-do-whatever-we-want.

 

 

Colorado, Memories, Minnesota, The Move

Ropes Slacken More

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Lughnasa                                                               College Moon

At the State Fair yesterday. Realized, as with the garden, how much my thoughts of next year and the year after were tied up in what I did today. I no longer went through the Agriculture building with a keen eye for new information, stuff I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Say, a new apple. Maybe a new way to compost or treat troublesome weeds. A different method for keeping bees healthy.

Also, that building where local groups like the Sierra Club present information, help you connect to networks in state. Didn’t even visit it.

That’s why, when Kate and I both realized we’d gone as far our legs were going to carry us, we hit the skyride for a trip over the fairgrounds and back to the express bus lot.

Still, there were memories there, of years volunteering at the DFL booth or the Sierra Club booth or, long ago, as a State Fair chaplain (mostly monitoring lost kids. though, come to think of it, I wonder how folks would feel about that these days?). Cheese curds. Foot long hot dogs. I can even remember drinking beer at the fair. That’s reaching pretty far back into my Minnesota past.

The sense of pulling back, pulling away, of not-quite any longer a full Minnesotan took something from the fair for me. It was not mine in the same sense it had been before. Not as much a shared experience, like the weather, that helps define Minnesota. Not shared fully because part of me has gone ahead to the mountains. To the Great Western National Stockshow.

The circus tent has considerable slack in the ropes. The rings and the bleachers have been packed. The moment when the elephants are called to strike the big tent? Not yet. Not for a while. But we don’t want to let them wander too far away. They will be needed.

Back to the packing. The end of book packing for right now (the bookshelf immediately beside the desk will remain loaded until this room has to be vacated for staging.) is in sight. Perhaps today. Then there are files and art objects, office supplies, novel manuscripts. Still a lot to do, but a lot less than existed three months ago.

Colorado, The Move

Red tape, green tape

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Lughnasa                                                      New (College) Moon

IMAG0572Today Islam went in a green tape box. Some of it. Those Tafsir books I got at the Dar-el Salaam Mosque in 2012. Red box. A bunch of outdated travel guides: Thailand, South America, Venice, Turkey. Some books on India and Japan, too. But I kept a bunch on Islam, Japan, Korea, India and Hinduism.

Now the empty bookshelves outnumber the filled, the boxes have begun to assume mass, large rectangles with colorful liquor ads spread out in random patterns. The green tape boxes now far outnumber the red, though a very large number of red have already gone. As the book mounds grow and the shelves stand empty, the reality of Colorado comes closer.

Colorado Gardening-for thinking gardeners-came yesterday. Not sure how they got this address, some random form filling probably, but the news is welcome. Up in Idaho Springs, Clear Creek County, our target destination, the last frost of the season looks like it will come on time, September 12th. Makes the necessity of hoops and plastic evident.

Anoka County, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, The Move, Third Phase

A Confrontation About Time

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Lughnasa                                                                    New (College) Moon

This week on the calendar I have on Monday through Saturday: pack, Latin. Thursday will be our state fair day. Other than that packing, Latin and work in the garden will occupy us.

Today and until I’m done I will be packing the study in which I work every day. That means the sorting will get harder, green tape boxes outnumbering red tape ones. Probably by a lot. It also means the confrontation between time remaining (in my life) and the projects (intellectual and creative) that keep me excited will come center stage. I’ll try to sort out the ones I feel I can fruitfully engage over the next 20 years from the ones I can’t.

That means I’m considering active intellectual and creative work at least into my late 80’s. That feels like a stretch, maybe, but one I believe my health and potential longevity justifies.

Let me give you an idea of what I have in mind. Complete the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Write at least four more novels. Write essays or a book on Reimagining My Faith. Write and read much more poetry. Write essays or a book on matters related to the Enlightenment, liberal thought, modernism. Write essays or a book on matters related to the Great Work. Include in this work considered attention to Asian literature, art and thought, especially Chinese and Indian. Continue regular art historical research and write essays about aesthetics and particular art/artists.

Why? Because I can. I’ve no evidence so far that my thinking is strikingly original or unusually deep, but my intellectual maturation has taken a longer time than I imagined it would. So the best may yet be ahead. Or so it feels to me. Under any circumstances such work will keep me alert and focused.

As for right now. Where are those empty boxes?

Colorado, The Move

Fun.

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Lughnasa                                                              Lughnasa Moon

Here’s an unexpected thing. I’m having fun. Complex projects taken from ground zero to functional used to be my main strength. Lots of project elements, interlocking timelines, decisions getting made, things getting done. Once the decision to move was final and the process began to gain headway, old work habits began to emerge.

We’ve got contractors, realtors, family and most of all ourselves committed to a next February put the house on the market date. That means we also have to find a new place in roughly that time, too. Pacing and execution spread over a year, a bit less, has made the work move smoothly and, except for psychic disjunction, the occasional cognitive dissonance of trying to be two places at once, without pain.

There is, of course, the climax of the whole matter governed by the sale price of this house. It’s a big unknown right now and will be for several months. But we will get the whole move finished and become Coloradans by some time in the first half of next year.

Colorado, Music, The Move

The Way West

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Lughnasa                                                                  Lughnasa Moon

More decluttering. Harder than it seems. Each decision means a bit of the past, or at least physical evidence of it, gets dismissed. It can feel harsh. I threw out today all the tours that I had designed while a docent at the MIA. Why? They are based specifically on objects at the MIA and will not be useful in another museum except in a very abstract way, too abstract to support moving them to Colorado. Still. Those tours, with 8-10 items, hours, sometimes days of research and the memories associated with the tours themselves were not just pieces of paper, but parts of my life.

(trails west)

It’s easier to throw out or box up to sell Minnesota focused gardening books and files. They’re related to a geographic particularity and we’ll not be here. The space those took up will have xeriscaping, Rocky Mountain flora, bee-keeping in the mountains books and files.

Now all of the files and books in the garden study, the six bookshelves in the exercise area and the three in the area outside the garden study have been sorted and almost all boxed, appropriately taped, or tossed.

Today’s music was Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. You gotta serve somebody, it might be the devil or it might be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody. The anti-libertarian ballad.

Colorado, The Move, Woolly Mammoths

Leave Taking

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Lughnasa                                                              Lughnasa Moon

Last night was a good example of what I’ll miss. Where will I learn about Flogging Molly? Who will want to play Rodrigo and the first movement of Appalachian Spring so I can appreciate their appreciation of them?

(Rodrigo monument in Aranjuez, Spain)

It was a sweet evening. And it started around a meat loaf, with ketchup squirted on top, ears of corn boiled and slathered with butter, roasted potatoes, a garden salad. This is Midwestern comfort food at its zenith, the ne plus ultra of small town supper tables. Cooked by Ode who said, “I like to cook. Have everything come out at the same time.”

These men. I’ve been with them so long. They know my stories and I know theirs. We want to know what each other listen to. Not to judge it, but to absorb it. It becomes part of our knowledge of each other, broadening our tastes as we deepen our understanding. Sort of like a book club only better.

These meetings are once a month and where once they stretched on to the horizon, now they have a terminus. Each one counts down, moving toward my last, at least my last as a Minnesota resident.

In more settled times, where moving on meant having the carpenter make a pine box, the preacher give a sermon and the gravedigger complete the work, this kind of leave taking most often happened unawares. One moment you were here and then either suddenly or after a brief illness, you were not. Unawares and remarked by rituals of leave taking, the pilgrim gone on ahead.

In this instance though the leave-taking stretches out and even after there will be the right of return. Not final, at least not yet.

Garden, The Move

Time-Shifted

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Lughnasa                                                                 Lughnasa Moon

IMAG0382Went out to the garden this morning after a week plus of packing, focused on the move, head and heart already time-shifted to matters months away. Oops. Lotsa weeds. Lotsa ripe vegetables. I was ashamed to see the shape of our garden. We plugged away at it until the gnats got too ornery. Got most of the beds mostly weeded. All the vegetables that were ready picked. Gotta spend more time out there over the next month or so.

The second planting of beets, some of the first crop of carrots, giant garlic bulbs, more onions flopped over, green beans (some gnawed at by tiny teeth. chipmunks? mice?), cucumbers, tomatoes and basil. The leeks look well ahead of schedule, almost mature now in mid-August where I picked them last year in late September. Lots of chard and collard greens left, too. Some peppers growing large.

The raspberries have just begun to come. Some of the reds have turned red, but not yet the deeper shade closer to maroon or purple that signals ripeness. The goldens have the berries formed, but no color yet. We’re entering the period of rapid maturity, for the vegetables, fruits and the weeds. This is the other burst of activity that the garden requires and it started a week ago without us.

Nature, as I was reminded by a Science Friday program, abhors empty ground. The raw soil in between rows and plants quickly filled up with weedy ground covers, spikes of grass, hopeful elm saplings. This is why no till ag is so important, but also why it’s practiced rarely. No till controls this ground covering tendency by having agriculturally useful plants in place of weeds.

Anyhow, back at it. And just in time, too.

The Move

We Cleaned Up

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Lughnasa                                                                    Lughnasa Moon

The bee colony hive boxes and honey supers with their copper roofs are in the orchard IMAG0624now. No bees though. They are a prop to show what can be done here, to add atmosphere. We will, if the buyer wants, leave enough woodenware to get a new beekeeper started.

We’re also going to leave our hydroponics setup and the lawn tractor, all more valuable to us as incentives for a new owner than as items to sell. We would not move these things for various reasons.

While I assembled the bee colonies, Kate cleaned the southwestern corner of the garage. Together we spiffed up the hydroponics and moved them onto the cleaned portion of the floor. This has opened a bay and a half in which we can store boxes, clear out the interior.

After all that, a thunderstorm during our nap. Perfect.

Colorado, Garden, The Move

Way In The Move

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Interesting. I’ve been living in the move. Too much. Pushing to get stuff packed, get the exterior work, house and grounds, underway, looking at movers and thinking about storage. Pushing. Turning on my phone and my jambox, listening to country music, Porgy and Bess, the blues, Coltrane while I fill boxes. Stuffing my life in liquor boxes, slapping on red or green tape, some packing tape, stacking them up. In the move. In it.

So much that this week I’ve done no Latin, little gardening, no writing other than the blog, been to no museums and taken little time to just consider life, be with it, flow toward the future. Except with the move. It’s as if I’ve time-shifted myself to next year, setting aside now for then.

But this is a long walk, not a sprint. And I’ve been sprinting. Time to slow down a bit. IMAG0477Smell the Latin, pick a tomato. Thin the third crop of beets and carrots. Bring in the onions from the shed.

Tomorrow we’re going to work outside and in the garage. A combination of then and now.

This balancing first toward the future, then back to the present, a sort of see-saw of attention and energy seems understandable to me, part of the inner work of leaving while staying. Staying while leaving.