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.
