Home Alone

“I don’t know why, but I love it when he’s out of the house,” she says with a sigh.

“And what do you do while he’s gone?” I ask.

“Nothing special. Nothing I wouldn’t do if he was around. I just enjoy having the house to myself,” she shrugs.

Ever since I reached a certain age, I’ve had some version of this conversation with a number of women friends. It often includes expressions of guilt (“I feel bad about wanting to be alone …”) accompanied by reassurances of the otherwise healthy status of the relationship (“It’s not as if we don’t get along...”).

I  haven’t questioned friends in same-sex relationships, or long-married heterosexual men, so I don’t know whether this sort of thing happens to them as well. But I suspect that women with male partners are the most acutely afflicted.

Usually the situation doesn’t arise until the couple retires, when, after years of spending the days in their respective workplaces, they suddenly find themselves sharing a living space 24/7. All kinds of revelations ensue. I, for instance, learned that my spouse liked to listen to NPR all day long. After intense negotiations, we arrived at an arrangement involving closed doors and earphones after Morning Edition goes off the air.

When couples downsize, space becomes an issue. Getting rid of things seems to come more easily to women than to men. “You wouldn’t believe all his stuff,” my friends complain. By stuff they mean aircraft carrier-sized desks covered in tilting piles of papers, outdated electronics in various states of disrepair, and slithering tangles of neckties that once enhanced his business attire.

And then there is Order and Neatness, another mostly female fixation. “When I used to come home from work,” one woman explains, “I was too tired to care if the newspaper was on the dining room table, or the closet doors were left open, but now…” Now the parka draped casually over a chair instead of hung in the closet, the rug left askew, and the imperfectly-shut dresser drawer become a major irritant, especially since the culprit is right there, all the time, doing nothing about it.  It’s possible that there are obsessively orderly men out there who suffer from their wives’ slatternly habits, but if so I wish they’d speak up.

Nevertheless, putting aside Noise, Stuff, and Neatness (too much of the first two, and not enough of the latter), there remains something about a male presence in the house that makes women long for regular doses of solitude. For one thing men, even less-than-king-sized ones, seem to occupy a lot of space. I first noticed this when I entered a co-ed high school. I couldn’t believe how much room boys took up, and how much noise they made. Whooping in voices that swooped unpredictably from bass to soprano, they loped through the halls, dropping books, slamming locker doors, jostling each other at the water fountain, stretching out their long legs under desks, and generally wreaking havoc.

True, by the time they reach their sunset years, most men have tamed that adolescent turbulence, but they still dash around more forcefully than women. In my half century of marriage, I have learned to keep well away from a closed door, in case my spouse should suddenly burst in. Even with gentle, slipper-wearing husbands who creep silently around the house, male energy has a peculiar quality that makes periodic breaks from it essential for the wife.

I suspect, however, that the need for conjugal respite has mostly to do with the heart’s propensity to grow fonder in absence. When the beloved’s presence adorns each day from dawn to dusk, it’s a necessary luxury to miss him for a while, in full knowledge that the pleasure of an empty house will soon be matched by that of hearing the key in the door, and the door shake in its hinges as the wanderer crashes in.

Some Things I Miss...

Some things I miss from my previous life:
Two goats
Ten hens
Nine garden beds
Four apple trees
A sloping hay field
A tumbledown stone wall
A swamp
The woods behind the house, and the thrush that sang in them
The imprint of fawn hooves on the driveway in mud season
The squeaky-door song of the phoebes at dawn
The frogs in the frog pond
The black bear at the bird feeder
The ermine in the garage
The milking pail, the cheese press
The me who believed she could keep it all going.

(photo by Alison Cobb)

Some Advice On Downsizing

Last spring at about this time I was in the throes of preparing to move to Wake Robin. It was the downsizing of a lifetime, the move before the final move to that tiny house that awaits us all--you know, the one where there’s no room to even stand up, not that we will want to stand up then.

Over three months, a constant torrent of stuff streamed out of our house--forty-eight boxes of books, some wooden spoons, a pressure cooker, my graduate school notebooks, a coin collection, the cheese press my husband made for me....  The books went to the library sale;  the pressure cooker and the coin collection went to the auction;  and I gave away the cheese press.  The grad school notebooks I guiltily jettisoned into the rental dumpster that decorated our yard.

Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, I feel qualified to pass on the following advice to those of you who are contemplating a similar move or are simply feeling trapped by too much stuff:

Don't give yourself a lot of time.  It’s going to be agony no matter how you do it, so take a deep breath and rip off the band-aid in one swift yank.

Remember that you are not your possessions.  More than that, your dearly departed--your mother who gave you that vase, the friend who painted that picture--are not that vase, or that picture.  They are not even IN the vase or the picture.  They are in your memories, and in your heart.  It's o.k. to let go of the things they left behind.

Don’t foist your treasures on your descendants.  It’s not their fault that on your wedding day you received seven silver nut dishes for which you have no use or space.  It’s not their fault that in a moment of madness you spent half your rent money on that oak Victorian desk.  They have no space for the desk, and they are too busy to polish silver.  Possibly they have never liked the dishes or the desk.  Taste in furnishings is not necessarily transmitted in the DNA.  Don’t take it personally.

If you decide to sell things, don’t expect to get for them anything near their real value, let alone the sentimental worth that they have accumulated for you over the years.  In this day of cheap goods, we are all drowning in material possessions.  Selling your things for a pittance, or giving them away, is the price you pay to have them disappear from your life, and it's a small price for the relief you will feel.

Trust me when I say that most objects, once you let them go, you will never miss.  You may never even remember them.  You think you’ll never be the same without your blue glass canning jars?  Go ahead and wrap them in newspaper, put them in a box from the liquor store and send them to the auction.  Once they’re out the door, if you ever think of them again it will be with the same serene fondness with which you now recall that boy you loved so desperately in high school, and the broken heart you thought would never mend.

(Sorry for the weird formatting--I can't seem to be able to fix it.)

Household Gods

If you've read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, you remember Ma's little china shepherdess.  Wherever the Ingalls family ended up--in the big woods, on the prairie, by Plum Creek, or in town--after the wagon had been unloaded and the floor swept Ma would unwrap the little china shepherdess and put her on the special shelf that Pa had made, and the Ingalls knew that they were home.

The ancient Romans were really good at finding gods for all kinds of things.  Among the most useful were the lares and penates, minor deities in charge of protecting the household.  In time, their name came to designate the statues representing them, and the term also spread to especially treasured household objects.

Like Ma and the Romans, I had my lares and penates, objects that followed me from house to house for almost fifty years of married life. The problem is, I had too many, and before moving to our present cottage I got rid of most of them. 

Sometimes, sitting in our new digs, looking out at the new view out of our new windows, I try to  imagine where my lares and penates ended up.  Are they hanging on somebody's wall, sitting on somebody's kitchen counter?  Have the gods who protected my household all those years transferred those duties to their new owners?  One thing I know for sure--of all the dozens of lares and penates I let go, I can only remember a mortar and pestle, and a set of wooden bowls.

However, I did hold on to a few, a very few, of my household deities.  One is a print of Lucas Cranach the Elder's Portrait of a Saxon Noblewoman, decoupaged on an old wooden board edged with antiqued gold paint. 


She sits on the contemporary equivalent of the household shrine, the mantel above the gas fireplace. She has to be one of the ugliest faces in Western art, and I wonder why I'm attached to her.  Maybe it's because she looks so alien.  In my family we tend towards the typical Spanish look--think el Greco--with thick droopy eyebrows to shade us from the glare of the Mediterranean sun, and eyes whose outer corners tilt down rather than up.

 

But I think the real reason I've enshrined the Cranach woman all these years is that she looks both mean and unapologetic.  I occasionally feel as mean as she looks, but I'm also inwardly apologizing all over the place.  The Cranach woman is mean-spirited and unfriendly, and she doesn't give a damn.  She not only embodies what is worst in me, she possesses a complacency that I can only aspire to.

Family lore has it that I was an exceptionally well-behaved, compliant child.  But as a toddler I had an evil doll, named Antonio, who was constantly misbehaving and having to be made to stand in the corner.  I think the Cranach woman on my mantel is Antonio's successor.  Like the ancient Romans, I know how to pick my gods. 

How I Survived the Move

From the first conversation about how maybe it was time to leave the house on the hill, it only took us five months to move into our cottage in Wake Robin, near Lake Champlain.  Some people take years to complete the process of choosing and then moving to a retirement community, but we said, "Why prolong the agony?  Let's get it over with."

This was my husband's and my fourteenth move since the Summer of Love of 1967, and you'd think that all that practice would have made us into pros, but this was by far the hardest move of all.  Since we were swapping a 2400 square-foot house with ten closets plus attic, basement, and outbuildings, for a 1400 square-foot cottage with four closets, we had to get rid of most of our stuff.

You will be surprised to hear that during this period I was not my sweet unflappable self.  In fact the combined anxieties about disposing of truckloads of belongings, and getting it all done in time for the move turned me into a sort of emotional porcupine.

And when, weary and guilt-ridden after a day of packing and sorting and flinging quills at my spouse, I tried to take a break, the chaos around me made it hard to relax.  Unclassifiable objects mocked me from half-filled boxes;  the dogs, anxious and bored, followed me panting from room to room;  and there was no comfortable place to sit. At the rate I was going, when we finally arrived in Wake Robin I would have to go not into independent living, but into skilled nursing.

That was when the universe sent me the inspiration to  re-read War and Peace.  For $.99 Tolstoy's masterpiece wafted into my Kindle and wafted me away from my chaotic Vermont homestead and into 19th century Russia.

I quickly realized that, in the decades since I'd first read the book, either Tolstoy had become a much better writer or I had become a better reader.  My jaw fell open at the masterful characterizations--Natasha's childish arms;  Pierre's spectacles;  Princess Mary's timidity.  My preference for the characters had changed as well.  In my twenties I had had eyes only for the intense, handsome Prince Andre, but now it was plump Pierre's soul that captivated me.  And those battle scenes that had bored me almost to death I now found fascinating--in part because they confirmed my suspicion that there is no "art of war," just a lot of noise and confusion and sheer dumb luck, or lack of it.

The day the movers came, I hardly noticed, so immersed was I in the battle of Borodino.  And Napoleon's retreat from Russia got me through the first hectic twenty-four hours at the cottage.  But the best part of this second reading of War and Peace was being able to take refuge in Tolstoy's voice, which remained the same, both powerful and serene, throughout my travails.  For the last week in the old house, that voice was the only constant in my life, and every time I dove into the book I thought, "does Tolstoy know, wherever he is, how grateful I feel?"

Despite my porcupine impersonations--or perhaps because of them--the move went without a hitch.  In fact, when the movers first arrived, the driver went through the house with me--up to the top floor and down to the basement, out to the garage and the old milking room--and as he passed the piles of neatly packed and labeled boxes he whistled and said, "boy, you've really got things under control here!"  It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

Here We Are

I finally found my drawing tools, so I made a picture of our cottage:

Legend:
1.  The Adirondacks
2.  Lake Champlain (visible only in winter)
3.  Weird little gingko
4.  My portable citrus orchard
5.  Grassy knoll mowed weekly by angels in human form

As you can see, my Vermont is still quite green...

Ta-Ta For Now

I guess I'll never be one of those heroic bloggers who manage to post every day no matter what is going on in their lives.

What is going on in my life right now is our impending move to a cottage at Wake Robin, a retirement community just south of Burlington, a stone's throw from Lake Champlain.

When I first envisaged this move, I thought I could keep up posting at least once a week, but I'm not  managing even that.  And it's not as if I don't have plenty to write about.  In fact, it's probably  the overabundance of topics that, as much as the sorting and packing, has kept me from posting.

Nothing prompts intensive soul searching like having to hold in your hands and make a decision about every single object in your house.  Some day I may write about all that has been going through my mind this winter and spring.  Paradoxically, this shedding of an old life and jumping into a new one requires the recklessness and optimism of youth, not to mention its energy.
But at present all I can think about is trolling liquor stores for empty cardboard boxes, keeping an eye on my dwindling stock of packing tape, and getting rid of the horrible odor that remains on my hands after a day wearing disposable gloves (I can't decide which I can tolerate better, to have my hands grimy with newsprint or smelling of rubber.)

So for now I'll go away from these pages, to return sometime in June when we're settled in our tiny abode in the northern reaches of my green Vermont.  I'm sure I'll have a couple of stories to tell.

My Portable Orchard

Maybe it's because they are person-sized and their outspread branches look like arms reaching out, but ever since I planted them four years ago, I've grown attached to my apple trees.  They almost seem more like people than plants.  Year-round they stand bravely around the patio, first veiled in flowers, then covered with leaves, studded with fruit in the fall and alternately sleeping and shivering--like me--in winter.

I will hate to leave them behind when we move.  Sure, there will be room in our new micro-garden for an apple tree or two, but they won't be these trees, whom I planted and nursed and fussed over from infancy to their present lovely maturity.

Fortunately, I'll be able to take my stalwart Giuseppina, the potted fig tree (see last post), with me.  But that is not all.

The tiny potted Meyer Lemon that I bought last year gave birth to six outsize lemons that I soaked in vodka and a simple syrup to make a lovely limoncello.  This, and the glossy deep-green leaves, and the fragrance that made my head swim every time I walked by, turned me into a citrus grower of sorts.

I was in Albany on a freezing January day when, going into a nursery for a shot of plant energy, I found a Page Orange tree that had been trained to have an upright trunk and a rounded canopy, just like the ones in Versailles.  I promptly bought it--it was the only one in the store--and brought it home, where it perfumed our sunny porch.  Then its blooms faded and were replaced with multitudes of baby Page Oranges (actually a hybrid between a tangelo and a tangerine) that I mist and murmur to every day.

The next time I was in Albany--how could I not--I stopped by the same nursery, and found a Calamondin Orange. I had had one of these before.  Its scented blooms were succeeded by dozens of tiny bitter fruits that I didn't know what to do with.  But that was before the internet, which has many ingenious uses for Calamondin Oranges.  So I brought the little tree home.

Meanwhile, the Meyer Lemon, which I had pruned to within an inch of its life in the hopes of making it look less like a bush and more like a tree, recovered and started putting out blooms.  But all this was happening indoors, and my experience last year taught me that, although the plant may bloom and set fruit abundantly in the house, only the flowers that are fertilized outdoors tend to make it to harvest. 

I wanted to make more limoncello--lots of limoncello, in fact--but a single tree might not yield enough fruit at one time to make a significant batch.  So I ordered another tree, online.  It is on its way as I write. 

I am doing all this, mind you, while simultaneously carrying out a draconian purging of our worldly belongings.  It is a testimony to my spouse's saintliness that he has not objected to this paradoxical behavior on my part.  True, the citrus trees will spend the summer outside.  But the minute the temperature goes anywhere near freezing, probably around the beginning of October, those four trees will come into our wee cottage, there to be misted and watered and given special lights and get in our way until April or possibly May.

What can I say?  I can no longer keep goats or raise chickens or grow vegetables.  But I have to farm something, and I will pour as much love and attention on those potted citrus trees and on the fig Giuseppina as I did on Lizzy and Emma--the goats--and the hens and the eggplants, the peppers and the apple trees.

Life Flashes

They say that when you're drowning, your entire life flashes by.  But that's not the only time this happens.  It also happens while you're downsizing.

A dozen times every day I disinter some long-ignored object that brings up a whole chunk of my life, and I have to ask myself, does this picture I painted, this article I wrote deserve to be kept, or thrown out?  You can see that  downsizing is a lot like drowning, only worse, because you have to pass judgment on every bit.

The books--forty-eight boxfuls--were the first to go .  As I parted with my beloved parasitology textbook I asked myself, what have I retained about the life-cycle of the tapeworm, the loa-loa worm, the blood fluke?  Little more than the ability to predict, when I found Wolfie and Bisou snacking on a dead rabbit, that they would get a case of Taenia, which they did.

And what about the stacks of French novels and plays and essays that I not only read but taught?  I can barely remember who wrote Madame Bovary.  Surely the tide of text that washed over my brain year in and year out left some residue--a starfish or a striped shell or a piece of sea glass?  Some days all I can find are old plastic shopping bags.  Other days the sand is bare.

The art paraphernalia took me some time to sort through.  The dried-out paint tubes, the half-filled sketch books, the dusty mallets and chisels. The framed pictures that fill my closet.  The stone heads that adorn my woods. Now it's almost all gone.  Whew!

At the moment, I'm working on the mountain of implements left behind by the other great fantasy that ruled my life, the earth mother myth.  There's the goat milking stand that my husband made;  the cheese press (ditto);  the heat lamp for the day-old chicks. All those morning chores, those barn cleanings, those births and deaths--where did they go?

This all sounds a little melancholy, but I am not in the least bitter or disappointed. I would say that I am mostly surprised.  Surprised that all that effort and striving, those years and years of cramming and pushing should have led up to...this:  me, getting ready to move with my spouse and my dogs to a retirement community, with one small truckload of worldly goods.

It seems disproportionate somehow, the work and the strain.  It's as if I'd spent my entire life preparing, and now I'm having some kind of graduation and I'm not even sure what I majored in, let alone what kind of work I'm fit for.

"Leap!" a yoga teacher once told me, "And a net will appear."  I have always liked a good leap.  Now, as the waves crash around me and the taste of salt is in my mouth, I trust that the net is on its way.

How I Learned to Travel Light

A single small suitcase, my violin, and a doll that I clutched to my flat chest--that is how I left Spain almost sixty years ago.  My parents carried one suitcase each, plus my father's violin and viola.  We were going on a great adventure to the heart of darkness.  And we were going to cross the Atlantic to New York, and then south all the way to Ecuador, by plane. 

My mother had a special suit made for the flight, and bought a new hat.  My father got a haircut.  My aunts tied freshly-ironed red ribbons around my pony tails.  PanAmerican Airlines treated us royally and issued us elegant blue-and-white flight bags, but they were adamant on luggage limits.  Hence the single suitcase, and the single doll.
 In my suitcase were a couple of dresses, some socks and underwear.  But the rest of my family of dolls, the little terracotta Madonna that stood at the head of my bed, and the Spanish translations of Mary Poppins, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Tom Sawyer were all left behind--along with my aunts and uncles and my four grandparents, not to mention the German nuns and the girls who had made fun of my glasses in school.

We were going, but only for a year.  In retrospect, remembering the look in my grandmothers' eyes, I think they must have known that we would never return to live in Barcelona.  But we, or at least I, didn't know that.  We were only leaving for a year.  We'd be back.

So when we arrived in Quito, and rented a house and unpacked our suitcases, we sort of camped out.  Since we were only staying for a year, and all furniture had to be hand-made to order, my parents got the bare minimum.  I remember a contemporary-looking but uncomfortable spindle-backed sofa.  And I especially remember the kitchen table, made by a less renowned artisan out of improperly-dried wood, which promptly curled up at the edges.

When the Ecuadorian government, to my parents' surprise and dismay, ran out of money to honor my father's contract, they nevertheless kept promising payment "any day now."  Before we knew it almost four years had elapsed, and we were still making do with the curly table and a couple of dented cooking pots.

When, out of the jungle mists, the opportunity arose to come to the United States, I packed my
suitcase and my violin and, leaving the doll behind, followed my parents to Birmingham, Alabama.  There again we camped out for the first few years, for how did we know whether things would work out?

I remember going to Sears with my  mother to buy some china, a couple of beds, and an upholstered sofa, less artisanal but more comfortable than the Ecuadorian one.  Even though there were no more financial disasters like the one that had befallen us in Quito, it took us a long time to settle.  When I needed a desk I bought a piece of plywood and screwed four legs into it.  It shook and wobbled with every stroke of my pen--and that is how I felt too, kind of wobbly and provisional.

The ponderous bookcases and dining room suite, the four-poster bed and the marble-topped dresser that had been handed down to my parents on their marriage, their crystal, china, paintings and silverware, not to mention all our books, remained in the apartment in Barcelona.  Eventually my mother had the bed and the dresser and the dining room suite shipped to the U.S., but by then I had once again packed my suitcase and my violin and gone off to get married.

Over the following decades I did accumulate a houseful of belongings, and though I never felt tied to a particular place, I did drag everything that could be moved from house to house and state to state.  But now I've come full circle, and am almost back to the single-suitcase, one-doll stage.  I have so far given away thirty-eight boxes of books.  I have taken two carloads of pots and pans, including my beloved stainless steel milking pail, to the auction with nary a tear.

But I'm not nearly done.  And as I close the flaps on one more box of stuff that seems to hold my past, it occurs to me that the exercise I went through as a ten-year-old, picking out which one of all my dolls I would take with me to the New World, prepared me well for choosing which objects will accompany me to the continent I am about to enter.

Seven Pounds of Cassette Tapes

There was a time, back in the quasi-medieval gloom of the twentieth century, when cassette tape players were cool.  If you were used to carefully threading reel-to-reel tape only to have it snap and strike you in the face like a cobra, the click of the cassette into the player, the thunk of the "play" button followed by music seemed as miraculous as getting water from a faucet versus fetching it from a well.

A technologically-inclined college boyfriend of mine was so enamored of cassette players that when he was away at his summer job he used to send me tapes instead of letters.  After I married, I learned that my new husband's grandfather was as fond of the little machines as my old boyfriend had been.  He used them to record family phone conversations, no matter how trivial.  If we called to let him know at what time we would arrive at his house, t we would hear the click that told us were being recorded for posterity.

And that is why, cleaning out a closet the other day, I came upon a bag containing seven pounds (yes, I weighed it) of cassette tapes. Seven pounds of forty-year-old conversations.  Seven pounds of baby babble.  Seven pounds of voices that will never speak again. 

There's me, sounding like a have a cold, interrupting the conversation to tell my toddler not to pick up the clock, please!  There's a three-year-old telling her grandparents that she just got new shoes.  There's me again, calling from the maternity ward to say I need my watch so I can time how long the baby nurses on each side...

I know what's in those tapes because one night around Christmas, after my mother in law died and the tapes were shipped to us, we sat around with our grown children and played a few of them.  And then for the decade that followed they sat in the closet, untouched.

Our present house has ten closets.  The cottage we are moving to has four--and no attic, no basement, no outbuildings.  No place to hold and hide the flotsam and jetsam of our long lives until it falls to someone else to find and deal with it.  But the shift from ten closets to four is forcing me to do something about those seven pounds of tapes, tout de suite.

When paper was scarce, not so very long ago, all that might remain of a grandmother's correspondence was a packet of yellowed letters bound in ribbon.  Before photographs became ubiquitous, you were lucky if your ancestors, if they were people of means, handed down a painted portrait or two.  But now the past, or at least the material evidence of the past, is always with us, demanding to be recaptured, relived, revered--and threatening to crush us with its weight.

I must confess to chafing under this accumulation of letters, photos, dry cleaners' bills, bits of lace, broken earrings--all of which meant something to someone at some time.  Why should I bear the moral weight of deciding what to keep and what to throw out?  Why should I have to grit my teeth and do what the previous generation was too soft-hearted to do?


I believe that the parents and grandparents who saved the things I find in our closets these days--a maternity ward receipt for my spouse's circumcision ($3.00), an embroidered hankie, the seven pounds of cassette tapes--were prompted by love for us, their descendants.  And it is a different expression of love, but one just as strong--love for those who will come after me and who should be spared from disposing of the relics of my past--that keeps me sadly but methodically making these objects vanish from our lives.

Last Egg

In chicken years, they were about my age.  No conventional egg farmer would have let them live so long past their laying prime, but time kept getting away from me, and they did do their best to lay an occasional egg, so I ended up coddling them through this brutal winter, buying them special grain  treats and filling their water dish with hot water laced with organic cider vinegar.

But although the retirement community to which we're moving is as green and granola as they come, they don't allow chickens.  Not wanting to postpone the inevitable, last night, in the dark, I plucked my hens one by one gently from the roost, and covering their heads with my hand to keep them calm, deposited them in the big dog crate, over which I then draped a dark cloth.

Today, in the clear, sub-zero dawn, we loaded the crate into the truck.  It was surprisingly light--old ladies don't weigh much--and my husband drove them to their final destination.

Except it wasn't exactly final, because nothing ever is.  Right now the hens are lying in state inside our freezer.  In a few days I will take them out and put them in the big stock pot with onions, celery and carrots, and let it all simmer for a day and a night.  Off the bones, the stringy meat will gladden the hearts of Wolfie and Bisou, and the rich broth will nourish my husband and me.  Thus, our six hens will literally become a part of us, until we in turn become nourishment for other forms of life.  Nothing is ever lost in this remarkably thrifty universe.

After my husband left with the crate, I went into the silent chicken coop.  I unplugged the heated water dish.  I looked at the frozen pile of droppings under the roosts and decided to wait until the spring thaw before hauling them to the compost pile.  Then I glanced into the nest and there was an egg, big and beige and frozen solid, one last gift from my last hens.

Thank Heavens for the Downstairs Guest Room

I can barely stand to be in my house these days, and given that winter is still raging outdoors and I have a lifetime's worth of worldly goods to sort through indoors, sometimes I feel on the verge of hysteria.

There are two reasons that being home makes me crazy.  The first is that every single object that my eyes light on--a picture on the wall, a rug on the floor, a plate on the table, a nutpick in the drawer--requires a decision:  to keep or not to keep, and if the latter, to a) throw away;  b) give away (and if so, to whom?); or c) sell (and if so, where?).

The second reason is that, having started the paring process with the bookcases that occupy almost every room, and having actually made some progress, those rooms are now defaced by stacks of book-filled liquor-store boxes that threaten to topple and squash Bisou.  And then there are those poor denuded book shelves, littered by the few volumes that have escaped my ruthless hand and showing, behind where the books used to be, a nine-year accumulation of dust and ashes.  If you are in need of rest and serenity, those rooms are the last place you want to be.

I know only too well that this--the dismantling, the decisions, the packing and the mess--is going to grow steadily worse over the next three  months before the halcyon date of June 2, when we will say farewell to this good house forever.  Three months of difficult decisions in the midst of chaos would normally unhinge me, but there is a chance that I won't lose my mind completely, thanks to the Downstairs Guest Room.

This blessed space has a sofa bed, a little table, an old pine chest, a once-glorious, now-faded rug, some pictures on the wall, a mirror, a good reading lamp, and no bookcase.  I have already decided that everything in this room, except for the pictures on the wall, is going to come with us.  Hence, until the last moment, it can remain in its present orderly state:  no empty boxes waiting to be filled;  no full ones waiting to be taken away, no choices, no angst. 

Every afternoon, when the sun begins to sink at the horizon and my spirits--weary from a day of deciding what to do with my long-abandoned stone carving tools or talking myself out of keeping a particularly soulful piece of pottery--start to plunge, I repair to the Downstairs Guest Room.  I turn on the lamp, dive into my Kindle, and proceed to knit the raveled sleeve of the day's care.

Need I mention that there's also Bisou snoozing on a cozy blanket on my right, and a glass of wine on the little table at my left?  Periodically, as I reach the end of a chapter, I look around and thank the universe for the Downstairs Guest Room, a sanctum where I can rest my eyes from the chaos, and my mind and my heart from the endless task of letting go, letting go, letting go.

"Like the Fingernail from the Flesh"

In the Spanish medieval epic, The Poem of the Cid, the hero fights to help his king regain territory lost to the Moors.  Like all such epics, the story is mostly battles and bloodshed, except for the moment when, preparing to leave on a raid, the Cid says good-bye to his wife, and the two part "like the fingernail from the flesh."

That was me last night, sorting books to give away in preparation for our downsizing.  I was working on the French bookcase, boxing up my high school French books, my college anthologies of French lit., the fusty Old French lays and epics and romances from grad school, and finally the texts I'd used to stuff all that knowledge back into the heads of my own recalcitrant undergraduates.

With a few exceptions, the books were dusty, since I hadn't touched them since our move to Vermont nine years ago.  For that matter, I hadn't touched many of them since grad school, except to take them down and box them up and then shelve them again at each of our many moves. 

But this time is different, because Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes won't be coming with me.  They'll be going to new homes or, more likely, to recycling plants, because who wants a bunch of old French books these days?  I'll be keeping the leather-bound Prousts and Colettes and a few others.  But the rest--the yellowed and brittle copies of long-ago works of genius with  my maiden name written inside the cover in green ink and the bizarre upright handwriting that I thought distinctive in my youth--I'll never see again.

As I forced myself to place each book in the box, it did feel a bit like the  fingernail being parted from the flesh, over and over. 

Today I'll tackle the Spanish and Catalan bookcase.  Next will come the art books, and then the dog books, and the country-living books.  I must be ruthless and not keep too many of them, because there's still three floors of material possessions to sort through, and I don't want my independent-living cottage to become a shrine to my past.  I must remember that the key to successful aging is flexibility, non-attachment, and a sense of adventure.

I know I'll get through it somehow, but by the time this move is over, my fingers will be a bloody mess.

There Be Dragons, Continued: Quandaries and Apprehensions

What if in the process of downsizing I throw out/give away stuff that I will later wish I still had?

What if I don't throw out/give away enough stuff and my adorable "independent living" cottage ends up looking like a rag-and-bone shop? 

Will going from six bedrooms and eighteen acres to two bedrooms and a handkerchief-sized garden give me terminal claustrophobia?

If an heirloom was foisted upon me in the first place, am I bound to hang on to it forever?

What makes an heirloom an heirloom?

Will I ever read La Chanson de Roland in Old French again?

Can Kindle and the internet really replace the contents of ten tall bookcases?

How many antique canning jars (the lovely deep-blue ones, with zinc lids) am I morally justified in keeping?

(To be continued.)

There Be Dragons

There's not been much room in my head for writing lately.  My brain has been occupied with, a) staying warm and, b) envisaging our move away from this particular corner of my green Vermont.

The move will be to an "independent living" cottage in a continuing care retirement community (CCRC).   In a CCRC, cottages huddle, like chicks with a mother hen, around a large central building that houses--in addition to progressively diminishing levels of independent living--dining halls, swimming pools, and a whole slew of "activity" rooms.  The activities in these rooms--and in the pools and trails and tennis courts--are what keeps the sun-tanned, white-haired couples featured in the brochures relentlessly smiling and perennially young.

"What?" people who know us exclaim, "you're way too young for this!"  And those who are closer and bolder predict, "You'll get old faster if you go to one of those places."

And, on the first count, they're partly right.  The average age of entry into independent living is seventy-eight, so at sixty-nine my spouse and I are being somewhat precocious.  But although I may look sixty-nine, thanks to CFS I often feel more like a frail eighty-five.

As to the second objection, I've always believed in the use-it-or-lose-it principle:  milk your goats, hang the laundry out to dry, clean out the chicken house, spread the compost, grow your own veggies, or you're bound to deteriorate.  But the fact is that, despite having done all those things, I have deteriorated.  And now I'm thinking that perhaps a different kind of life--where I don't have to garden  or cook or go to the grocery store unless I'm dying to--might remove some pressure and relieve anxiety.

Believe me, though:  in my darker moments I do worry about that second caveat, and can see myself quite clearly a year from now--stoop-backed, shuffle-gaited, old.

I thought that you would be good company as I prepare to parachute into this exotic landscape, which seen from my present altitude abounds in green pastures and waters where I may rest, but whose woods and caverns may well be crawling with monsters.

I'll be posting on this topic frequently.  You can stay safely inside the plane if you like, but cross your fingers for me as I jump out.