Daily Archives: October 26, 2014

Colorado, The Move

A Day of Rest? Not so much

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Fall                                                                                   Closing Moon

Transferred gas and electric utility to our name, effective 10/31/14. Connected dsl and landline service effective 10/31/14. Bought washer and dryer online from Sears Outlet. In budget.

Harvested the leeks, the true last harvest from our garden. Leek and chicken pot pies on Tuesday. Kate’s been busy getting stuff organized for my trip. She packed up all the canned goods and I’ve started carrying them upstairs. I’m taking my second Gateway desktop and our HP inkjet printer, too. Various potions from International Ag Labs will be on this load, plus one gas can. Coffee press, tea kettle, sleeping bag, pillow, toiletries. A chair, a folding table, a lamp.

We bought a washer and dryer online from Sears Outlet and they get delivered on November 4th. I’m going to track down a freezer while I’m there.

And of course there’s the routing number and account number of the closing company so, high finance style, I can wire money to the closing on the 31st. I have to take a power of attorney with me that allows me to represent Kate in the closing. Lots of little moving pieces.

The big oriental goes into the American Rug Laundry for its last shampoo and rinse in this state. Then it will go on the moving truck, not back on the floor.

Oh, and I have to visit the library for recorded books. Traveling cross country is a lot of seat time. As I’ve said here before, I use these trips as retreats, spending some long periods in silence, meditative, not meditating. Contemplative. Clears away the webs of the day-to-day.

With this week coming up one full ring of the three-ring tent will be collapsed, rolled up and packed on the train. That’s the Colorado ring. The Andover tent will stay up until this house is sold. The third ring, the move itself, will come down in mid-December. That tent is getting smaller. The circus is leaving town.

Colorado, Minnesota, The Move, The West

Deep in Memory

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Fall                                                                                                  Closing Moon

On the ladder taking down the angelic weather vane I noticed the poplar, ironwood, elm and oak still gave some color to our woods. Bare branches mostly, but a few lingering leaves held on. I’ve found myself wistful this fall, realizing that with this move to the arid west, and reinforcing that, a move to 8,800 feet, we’re going to an alpine eco-system from an oak savannah. All my life (with the exception of 1.5 years in Oklahoma at the very beginning) I’ve lived in the remnants of the big woods or near the boreal forest. You can say I’m a mammal adapted to the ways of deciduous forests and their near cousin the northern forests.

The blue skies of autumn with the cirrus clouds providing white slashes for expression seem wedded, to me, to the falling of birch leaves and maple leaves, oaks and elms, ironwood and black locust. The cooler winds that these skies accompany smell of humus, fresh water and carry just a hint of the polar ice caps. This is what fall is, deep into my memory, deep into the formation of my self.

Last week at Black Mountain Drive I stood on pine needles, duff and granite, saw a few small alpine plants, some moss and had seen on the drive up there a few ash leaves, golden, on the browning grasses. The blue skies there have the cirrus high above them, but the falling leaves are golden, ash being by far the dominate deciduous tree in the mountains and up at 8800 feet far behind the conifers.

Folks I know often name fall as their favorite season here. I know it’s mine. Wonder what it will be out West? Unknown for now.

 

Family, The Move

Early Bird

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Fall                                                                            Closing Moon

Kate and I got up at 7 am. Drove down to Keys on University for breakfast. Keys was closed. I felt like such an early bird, up before the breakfast place opened. We settled on a sparsely inhabited Baker’s Square, not our first or even second choice since we tend to stay away from chains.

It had a few single men and two couples. The single men looked like folks who lived alone and who needed to get out in the world once in a while. A bit desolate. One moved his fingers in the familiar arthritic dance, flexing each one separately then giving the wrist a slight shake. He looked at his hand with the faint disgust of one whose body no longer serves as well as it once did. Another stared with a grim face at a laptop computer, sitting on a leg curled up.

Kate and I were, as is inevitable these days, talking logistics. What tasks the day held. What things remain undone. What we need to do before I leave on Wednesday for the closing in Conifer.

Kate spent the morning, while I slept, still trying to get back to a sleep equilibrium, packing up canned goods, the products of our gardens over various years. Now I’m going outside to move more hive boxes and honey supers from the far shed, take off the angelic weather vane that I want for our new shed or, perhaps, the garage.

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Family

50 Years Ago

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Fall                                                                                    Closing Moon

Awoke this morning and looked at my e-mails to see that my sister, Mary, had e-mailed me a photograph of Mom’s obituary. October 25th, 1964. Mom’s been dead 50 years. It is, as Mary said, hard to imagine.

The obit was by Bud Zink, the publisher of the Alexandria Times-Tribune, the daily newspaper which my father served as editor for many years. The obituary said the whole town mourned when Mom died. Mom volunteered at the church, did substitute teaching in Alexandria elementary schools and was well-known and well-loved. In a town of 5,000 you can be known by almost everybody.

Her whole life was her family, Bud wrote. And that was true. Seems hopelessly old-fashioned now. She never learned to drive. Cox’s Supermarket was only a couple of blocks away from home. Downtown just a block further.

Feminism has looked back in anger at such narrow lives, or more accurately, at lives lived that narrowly by sexist fiat. Because I was 17 when mom died, I never had a chance to ask her how she felt about such things. They weren’t in our consciousness yet. Her eagerness to finish her teaching degree, which she was doing in the period immediately preceding her death, makes me think she might have had other ambitions.

In World War II, as a WAC, she traveled to Italy and Algiers with the Army Signal Corps. I still have small framed pictures of Capri where she spent some time during her posting in Italy. So she was a world traveler in her 20’s and for a woman in the 1940’s that was not common. Her horizon must have been broader than I know; she had been exposed to a life different than that of the rural Indiana in which she grew up.

She died 50 years ago and in her death showed me that this most feared and mysterious reality of the human journey is ordinary. Nothing is more ordinary than dying. And in that, perhaps, is its greatest power. That something so final can be so ordinary.