Category Archives: The Move

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, The Move, Writing

Walk In Free

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Letting go. Retiring. Easing up. Yes, the pedal has lifted up from the metal and the car has begun to slow down. And that’s a good thing. Letting go of the expectations, admitting they were not met and saying damn the consequences has lifted a large weight off the shoulder of my psyche. Retiring it. Shrugged off and glad to have it gone.

Does this mean I’ll stop writing? No. Does it mean I’ll stop writing novels? No. It does mean that I no longer have my self’s forward progress attached to the results. And, you might say, about damned time. Maybe so.

Why is all this bubbling up right now? The move. As the stuff of my work gets winnowed, I can see the bones of my ambition more clearly. The skeletal support of my dreams are familial, horticultural, intellectual, classical and creative. The flesh and bones will be grandchildren, sons and daughters-in-law, wife, friends, plants, ideas, translations and more novels.

Failure does not mean stop. Vanish. Extinguished. It does not mean failed. No, it means redirection, recollecting, revisiting. This move has given me the freedom to shrug my shoulders, let the load fall to the way side. I want to walk into Colorado free to live a life given to that place, those people, that time. Now I can.

Going west has always had an element of reinvention, claiming another facet of life. May it be so.

Colorado, The Move

Slow, steady

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Lughnasa                                                        Lughnasa Moon

After picking the wild grapes, the garden study packing. With some minor exceptions it is now clear and all the furniture in it, three bookshelves, two file cabinets, a work bench, a drafting table and a desk (which sounds like a lot I know) can go either to the consignment shop or into storage for staging.

(Albert Bierstadt-Estes Park, Colorado, Whyte’s Lake)

The bookshelf that held all my gardening related books is, too, almost empty. After I parse the files, quite a few, I’ll be ready to begin in the study itself. Kate has gotten a good start both downstairs and upstairs. We’re making progress, slow and steady, just like we planned.

Kate made grape jelly today from the grapes I picked, 24 quarter pints and 12 half pints. As we watched the end of State of Play, the musical clicking of jelly jars sealing punctuated the evening. In spite of my low carb ways I sampled it. Pretty damn good.

 

Colorado, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, The Move

Memory Train Passing

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Lughnasa                                                                     Lughnasa Moon

The garden study packing, nearly done, came to a halt due to a need for some more packing supplies that won’t arrive until Wednesday. But it’s close to empty. By packing up the garden bookshelf tomorrow, I’ll be able to finish that whole area when the new plastic file holders come.

That means Wednesday the biggest push of the project will get underway. The culling and packing of the study itself. In some ways it may go quicker than the garden study, but there are many more books involved. There will not be though, in here, the picture I found today of my two and half-year old self trying to crawl while my mother and a post-polio rehab specialist looked on. My neck is on the floor, curved up at angle.  I’m looking up at the photographer. Brought a pang of empathy for that little guy, long dissolved into the man, but still present.

Nor will there be the hot picture of Kate taken beside the Siah Armajani bridge between Loring Park and the Walker Sculpture Garden. Or the polariods of Mary and Dad, of our house on E. Monroe Street and the one on Canal. Each of these stopped me and I had to wait for the memory train to pass before I could cross the intersection and get back to work.

Also, I packed in a red tape box, sell, my copies of three volumes of St. John of the Cross. To anyone else they would be have been old books, fat paperbacks that cost $1.65. To me though they were the touching gift of a fellow philosophy student at Wabash College, a senior, who saw something in me and wanted to share his passion. Yet now 40 years removed, even that connection no longer made me want them.

They were not the only decisions like that. Books, for me, often entrain memories in just the same way a photograph or a travel souvenir does. That makes these choices hard sometimes and feelings slow the process down. Taking a year makes a lot of sense.

 

 

Colorado, Family, The Move

Saturday’s Way

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Lughnasa                                                                             Lughnasa Moon

We had our business meeting this morning at Keys. Seated in the same booth where Mark Odegard and I ate breakfast yesterday. Odd, like a movie set where the scene remains the same, but the actors and the movie itself change.

We reviewed our finances as we always do. We’re still above water and likely to stay that way unless we get a real desire to cruise the world. (which, I admit, I have, but at a manageable level. For now.) We looked at the calendar, a blessedly uncluttered one which gives us time to pack, garden and patch that leaky chain link fence.

Now that the initial spike of house hunting fever has waned, we’re focused on the mundane. Get the boxes. Fill them. Decide on what work needs doing and getting it done.

There is an odd combination of anticipation and resistance, both of which make sense to me at this point. We anticipate the move as if it’s already happened and resist the work necessary to make it happen. But then, since we’re adults, we pick up the books, take them off the shelves and place them in the Jack Daniels box and the Sky Vodka box and and the Captain Morgan Rum box. We are moving the drinking habits of the Andover area to Colorado.

 

 

 

 

Colorado, The Move

By September 18th

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Lughnasa                                                                Lughnasa Moon

We’ve set another SortTossPack date, September 18th. By this point my goal is to have all the books that will go to Halfprice Books ready. The remainder of the books-everything but those I need right now-will also be packed as well as all the art and smaller objects from the study. The garden study, which I plan to complete packing this weekend will be empty of books and files as will the main room in the basement.

At this point we’ll be down to shelving units, desks, file cabinets and cabinets, some of which will go to the consignment shop and some of which will go into storage. On the 18th we’ll probably put a good bit of our stuff into storage unless we decide to save that until later.

After the second SortTossPack day, we plan to have the garage floor epoxied and the basement floor if necessary. Sometime in that same period we’ll have the driveway seal coated, the remainder of the outdoor handyman work done and the lawn work contractor will complete the necessary pruning, leveling and mending.

We want to get most of this done before winter sets in so we don’t add to the confusion with water and mud.

Fortunately, we have the financial resources to do all this and the work inside, mostly painting and some minor repairs. This is all in service of getting the house and grounds in optimal shape for putting the place on the market.

Continuing my circus tent analogy, some stakes are up, some ropes are slack, but the canvas is still in place and the center poles still hold everything taut. Still, even a casual observer would know now that the circus was getting ready to leave town.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, The Move

Summer’s Exhaust

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Lughnasa                                                              Lughnasa Moon

Summer’s exhaust has begun to hit our nights as warmer days recede slowly toward the equator.  The light has begun to change, especially in the evenings, but visible during the day as well, coming to us at a different angle. The change is noticeable now, a month and a half after the sun’s greatest height of the year on the Solstice. These subtle clues cue birds and other animals to begin edging toward migration or fur growing or nut gathering. They come to each living thing in a scale appropriate to the action needed, less subtle to the birds and the bees, more subtle to us large mammals.

I’m celebrating the ending of my last northern summer, one I’ll trade next year for a mountain summer, which must be as distinctive in its own way. When I moved north, now 45 years ago, I wanted cleaner breaks between seasons. And I got them. I’ve appreciated the heat and humidity of summer here. The cool blue of fall. The icy depths of winter and the explosive coming of spring. Moving west into the mountains, I’m hoping to modulate the heat and humidity of summer and lessen the brutality of the winter.

It might have been my August trips to Stratford, Ontario as a boy that made me yearn for the northern summer. Along Lake Huron then the skies were heart-breaking, a mix of faded heat and oncoming chill. I felt stimulated, alive both to the weather and to the cultural tradition of Shakespeare and the theater. It was then, too, in 1963 at the Black Swan Coffee House in Stratford that I first heard a radical critique of American policy in Vietnam. Perhaps those things forged a bond, the northern summer and activism, because they’ve been joined since my move to Wisconsin in 1969 only six years later.

 

 

Colorado, Friends, The Move

Progress

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Lughnasa                                                                Lughnasa Moon

I’ve made substantial progress on the garden study. Two bookshelves empty, the other sorted and now awaiting only a new round of boxes from G-will Liquors. One file cabinet liquor boxesis empty, too, as are most of the other pieces of furniture in the room. What remains are two full drawers of a four drawer horizontal file cabinet and part of the third, though the files in that drawer will go in the trash, so no decisions to be made.

It’s the decisions that slow me down. And the memories. And sometimes the memories make the decisions hard. Sometimes not. I found a young picture of Jon from a camping trip he and I took about ten years ago. Bridget, Emma’s sister, and given to Jon as a companion when he lived alone, stood there healthy and alert, a beauty. The pictures all stayed, of course. In other cases I found old copies of colonoscopy prep instructions. Out. Ah, the memories those invoked.

Tomorrow I have to review my Latin for a Friday session with Greg. On Thursday I have lunch with Margaret and Justin from the Sierra Club. On Friday, breakfast with Mark before my time with Greg.

This means I probably won’t finish the study until the weekend. Later than I wanted, but not by much. After that, a rest and then I’ll tackle the main event. Editing my life’s ambitions down to a size befitting the time and energy that remains. Believe it or not, I look forward to it.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Our Land and Home, The Move

Shorter, More Intense

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Lughnasa                                                          Lughnasa Moon

Did some climatological research yesterday about the Idaho Springs area. This is life a 7,500 feet +. It’s cooler when Minnesota is hotter and warmer when Minnesota is colder. So far, perfect. Still winter, but not so brutal. The gardening zone, based on winter low temps is 5a. That’s roughly what Andover is said to be these days though I find it more like 4b. Still, let’s call it equivalent.

The big differences are in rainfall, about half of Andover’s in Idaho Springs, and growing season. The first frost in Idaho Springs is between September 1st and September 10 over against October 5-10 for Andover. The last frost was the big surprise to me-between June 21 and June 31. An early last frost would come on the Summer Solstice!

So. This will be a far different gardening environment from Andover, one requiring either starting of plants  or protecting plants planted outside or both. One factor I haven’t researched because I’m not sure how to is the strength of the sun. Elevation both thins the air and puts the garden closer physically to the sun. This results in a higher UV index overall and I imagine (and stepson Jon says it’s so) this will result in accelerated plant growth. If I can prevent the sun from burning the plants.

This will all require a lot of new learning, but it will be that learning that will eventually marry me to a new spot on the planet. I’m looking forward to it.

Colorado, The Move

Weighty

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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.

 

 

Art and Culture, Asia, Cinema and Television, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Latin, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Purging We Will Go

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Lughnasa                                                     Lughnasa Moon

Over the weekend and as deep into this week as I need to go, I’m packing up my former study. I’ve purged one file cabinet and consolidated its content into boxes for moving. A horizontal cabinet awaits attention. A large plastic tub full of art supplies went into the move with care pile. One small bookcase has been emptied and moved. The shop work bench I’ve used for storage is empty, too. That old printer, the one I bought in 1994, is in the truck and ready to go to a recycler.  An HP laserjet, it still functions.  That leaves three larger bookcases and some miscellaneous things on various surfaces, plus the art on the walls.

(what I hope to create in Colorado, my own version of this.)

When this room has been tidied up, the next and last big push begins. My study. This room has walls of books. Many will go in boxes with red tape, but most will not. The other areas have gone well, but this one will present some difficulty. So many projects. Some of the past, some of the future, some of today. Which ones do I imagine I’ll continue in Colorado? Which ones have enough spark to be valuable in the final third of my life? These are hard decisions for me and packing this room will be both valuable and difficult.

This is a chance to prune my work over the last third of my life, clear out the branches that have grown across each other. Take out that large branch that flourished then died. Increase the circulation amongst the remaining branches so they have air, can breathe. Pruning gives renewed vigor to plants and I hope to achieve the same thing when I pack up these materials, those closest to my heart, leaving behind what I no longer need.