Yearly Archives: 2014

Colorado, The Move

Time Grows Short

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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.

 

 

General
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We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what it is we’re heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of thier old age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience.

Milan Kundera, in ‘The Art of the Novel’

Colorado, The Move

Deconstruction

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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

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Samain                                                                           Closing Moon

IMAG0564Key’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

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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

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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.

 

Colorado, Friends, Minnesota, The Move

Restless

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Samain                                                                  Closing Moon

A rambling, aimless energy. A similar feeling to the one just before a major holiday, when preparations are mostly finished, but the time is not yet. Wandering, a bit difficult to focus, not sure what’s important, since most of the important things have either been done or cannot be done yet. We have a mortgage, a new home, a fence contractor at work, a moving company scheduled, workers ready to renew our old home after we vacate it. Yes, there are a few things left for us to pack, but they’ll be finished soon. But we don’t leave until mid-December. An odd place.

This is no longer the neither here nor there feeling, nor the liminal space of living in the move. This is a before the move feeling. We’ve pushed Sisyphus-like this boulder up, up, up the hill and now it’s about to take all that momentum and careen down the other side. But. Not. Quite. Yet.

Off to play sheepshead tonight, perhaps my last time unless I teach the game to Jon, Jen, Kate and Barb. A good distraction. And another farewell.

Just went online, put in Colorado sheepshead and found, to my surprise, a meetup with 10 members, formed Oct. 25, 2014 for players of sheepshead. I joined. Who knows? Might be fun.

Forgot to mention that I also got an invitation to be introduced to the Conifer Rotary. I’ll probably pass on that. Sierra Club or the local Democratic party are more likely affiliations for me.

 

The Move

Close

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Samain                                                             Closing Moon

The moving documents have been signed. The oriental rug is inside from the truck, carried on my back, an action barely within my physical limits. The guy at the American Rug Laundry makes it look easy.

After completing my Latin quota for the day (which I’ve set aside for nearly a month until yesterday), I’ll be back to packing. The goal this week, finish packing my office. Then, there are files and papers I haven’t touched in years and may just choose to pitch. After that, I’ll have to stop and think. I may be done or will be close to it. By mid-week next.

 

Cooking, Woolly Mammoths

A Shoutout to Calvin

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Samain                                                                                Closing Moon

Not often that your waiter hands  you his card. Calvin handed his card to Tom last night at Cafe Zentral. He was our waiter for the evening and a very knowledgeable one. On his card was his web address: www. stalvig.com from which the copy below is taken.

Shows that traditional boundaries and boxes don’t have to contain us. A shoutout to Calvin and his brand.

STALVIG is a lifestyle and craft brand lived and handmade by CalvinCalvin Stalvig

Raised on Lake Superior, based in Minneapolis, and residing for stints in Berlin, Calvin is in the world roaming countrysides, pedaling city streets, leisurely lunching, baking pies, climbing trees to forage for apples, preserving garden harvests, crafting, traveling, gathering friends, sewing, knitting and learning.

Life should be inspired, meaningful, beautiful, simple, and shared. Handcrafted Life is Art.

Cooking, Friends, The Move, Woolly Mammoths

Rich in History and Rich in Memory

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Samain                                                                               Closing Moon

Lunch today with Ode, discussing a brochure, a sales book for our house at the Birchwood Cafe. Dinner tonight with Tom, Roxann and Kate at Cafe Zentral. Each of these moments, extending friendships, adding to the years of time together, and in that sense not all that remarkable, are nonetheless remarkable. And poignant.

At lunch today Ode passed me as he came to sit down, placed his hand a moment on my shoulder. In that brief touch was twenty-five years of shared history, of knowing each other. We ate, spoke of our move to Conifer-“This is really happening,” he said.-his upcoming long trip to France with Elizabeth, about the cutting boards he was making of exotic woods. Then, we discussed which pictures, what words, might help that one person or couple see our property as their next home. And we were done.

Kate and I came early to Cafe Zentral, a relatively new restaurant at 5th and Marquette in the old Soo Line Building. The blue line runs beside it, on its way out to the airport and the Mall of America, on the way back to Target Field where the Twins play.

This place is dim, in the way that upper end restaurants often are. The food was excellent and continued that trend I’ve experienced elsewhere. That is, you get less food as you pay more for it. Gotta be one of the few products for which that’s the case.

It was not the food though, not the restaurant, not the blue line or the downtown location, but the friends. Tom and I have been Woolly Mammoths exactly the same length of time. We were initiated at Valhelga together, a year or so after the Mammoths came into existence.

Again, we spoke of this and that, but even the content of the words was not so much the point, but the being together, the being seen by each other, the acknowledging of those years, the now long years we’ve known each other.

So today I am a rich man. Rich in friends and in history. And able, thanks to long years of analysis, to say good-bye and retain these friendships. To see the parting not as final, not as abandonment, but as the closing of a chapter, the end of a period of time. I’m grateful to all these friends who value me enough to say farewell.