Thanks, everyone, for your encouraging words, in comments and emails! They help.
Two week countdown to September 1.
I'm happy about it, but moving is harrying. I want to make these last couple weeks as pleasant as possible. I bought paper plates, for instance, to cut down on chores, and some nice things to eat.
Peaches!
And I've taken off work all of next week.
The cognitive load of sorting things is heavy, making decisions about little but weighty things.
How many years of IRS returns should I save?
I have them back to 1985. One article said, save them all.
I shredded them.
What about the eighteen world geography books I wrote between 2003 and 2014? (White spines, on top of bookshelf.) No point giving them away: Libya ends with Ghaddafi "bringing Libya back into the family of nations"...
I'll save a couple representative ones––Zimbabwe, my first African country, which won an award. And Finland, written with the help of The Finnish Friend. (Hi, Mortmere!) I made and photographed pulla, cardamom/cinnamon rolls for that book.
That's a good span.
(Some of this ^ ––the pair of roller blades––belongs to Mz.)
And the jam jar of my father's ashes?
Low, the doll who likes dirt, is keeping them company on my bookshelf, third shelf, right.
Low will come to the lake with me, to place my father's ashes at the Jim-Jim Tree––the flowering crabapple tree where bink and I put some ashes of our friend Jim, when he died of AIDS in 1995.
Since then, I've added ashes of my uncle Gil and my mother.
It's been a harassing summer here, and I've been rushing too much.
Mz used to call this apartment the Castle of Peace and the Treehouse. Even though some trees got cut down, I want to tap into that.
If I don't sort through everything, so what? I'm going to take more time to sit and remember the life here.
Two week countdown to September 1.
I'm happy about it, but moving is harrying. I want to make these last couple weeks as pleasant as possible. I bought paper plates, for instance, to cut down on chores, and some nice things to eat.
Peaches!
And I've taken off work all of next week.
The cognitive load of sorting things is heavy, making decisions about little but weighty things.
How many years of IRS returns should I save?
I have them back to 1985. One article said, save them all.
I shredded them.
What about the eighteen world geography books I wrote between 2003 and 2014? (White spines, on top of bookshelf.) No point giving them away: Libya ends with Ghaddafi "bringing Libya back into the family of nations"...
I'll save a couple representative ones––Zimbabwe, my first African country, which won an award. And Finland, written with the help of The Finnish Friend. (Hi, Mortmere!) I made and photographed pulla, cardamom/cinnamon rolls for that book.
That's a good span.
And the jam jar of my father's ashes?
Low, the doll who likes dirt, is keeping them company on my bookshelf, third shelf, right.
Low will come to the lake with me, to place my father's ashes at the Jim-Jim Tree––the flowering crabapple tree where bink and I put some ashes of our friend Jim, when he died of AIDS in 1995.
Since then, I've added ashes of my uncle Gil and my mother.
It's been a harassing summer here, and I've been rushing too much.
Mz used to call this apartment the Castle of Peace and the Treehouse. Even though some trees got cut down, I want to tap into that.
If I don't sort through everything, so what? I'm going to take more time to sit and remember the life here.
