Tag Archives: Moving

Courage at Twilight: Which Bedroom?

Preparing for the move, I wondered which room would be best for my bedroom.  The basement bedroom is my favorite guest room because it is cooler, darker, more quiet, and more private—cave-like.  The west-facing room with its big windows grows hot in summer.  The other room has four bunk beds for when the grandchildren were younger.  I decided that the basement would not do: if something went wrong in the night, I would not be able to immediately hear and respond.  I consulted with Mom and Dad, and we decided to take the bunk beds down and move my bed in.  They offered to let me use the larger (hotter) bedroom for my home office.  The ceiling fan and window blinds will ease the heat.  How gracious Mom and Dad were to volunteer this arrangement—it will work beautifully.  The bedroom is simple, with my bed, dresser, and nightstand.  The office has the only other furniture I brought: my 30-year-old first-ever kitchen table that my daughter Erin later refinished with black legs, dark wood-stain top, and painted flowers and vines, for my desk—at this desk, I typed the manuscripts of my book Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road; a wood filing cabinet; a glass-doored book case for my current journals, writing projects, and reading list; and, the tall driftwood specimen Dad carried off Mount Timponogos in the 1950s and transformed into a gorgeous lamp.  It sits on my great-grandfather Baker’s low, round, oak table with lathe-turned legs.  I feel like I have come home.

Courage at Twilight: First Big Blunder

John Wayne stayed in Tooele, and Hannah went with her mom. But Brian and Avery came and to help me unload the truck.  Lila (almost 2) ran around talking and playing and exploring and shyly approaching Mom and Dad, her great-grandparents.  I had communicated, I was sure, with Mom and Dad about where I thought it best to store my belongings: in the main basement room against the east wall.  In fact, I had not discussed it with them.  I had only imagined discussing it, and had fabricated, apparently, a memory both of the conversation and of their assent.  But this was not the storage location they preferred: putting my stuff there would turn their family gathering place into a storage room.  I was stunned, not at their preference—it is their house and their space, and my obligation and opportunity to respect them.  Rather, I was stunned at my having transformed the fantasy of my unuttered thoughts into the reality of a memory of a conversation that never took place.  Dad pointed me to a small unfinished area of the basement I was confident would not fit my belongings.  But I did some quick organizing, laid down my 2x4s, and got ready to bring in the boxes.  I applied a wide strip of amazingly adhesive plastic down the stairs to the basement and up the stairs and down the hall to my room.  I did not want the boot traffic and black dolly wheels to ruin the light-colored shag.  Clanking down the stairs with boxes of books on the dolly was a chore straining our arms and legs and back.  Brian and I were sore the next day!  On the moving-in side, Brian and Avery were my heroes.  By night’s end, I was, simply, exhausted, took two Aleve, and fell like a boulder into bed.  But not without remembering sheepishly my first new-home blunder, committed before even moving in.  I will need to be extra careful to clearly communicate so as to navigate my space while not infringing on theirs.  Fortunately, Mom and Dad are generous, flexible, and forgiving.

Courage at Twilight: Moving Day

Moving day finally came. I rented a 16-foot Penske truck from Home Depot, with a dolly—I was not going to schlep all those boxes of books one at a time.  My son Brian (31) and daughter Hannah (15) volunteered to help me load the truck.  I had been so focused on packing and cleaning that I neglected to ask for help loading the truck.  Brian brought a friend he met years earlier in Oklahoma during his church missionary service.  His Chinese name sounds like John Wayne, and he invited me to just call him that.  Brian, Hannah, and John Wayne were heroic!  We loaded a thousand boxes (actually 100) and a few pieces of furniture I am keeping.  Most of my furniture and household furnishings I am leaving for Brian and Avery to use, since I will not need them (or have room for them) at Mom’s and Dad’s house.

Many poignant thoughts struck me as I drove the big truck away from Tooele to Sandy.  (1) I am mourning leaving my apartment—my home.  No matter how good the new circumstance, we often grieve the circumstance we leave behind.  (2) Living alone in an apartment after 27 years of marriage was not my choice.  But making that apartment my home was my choice.  And I made it a beautiful, comfortable, safe, peaceful, happy home for myself, and for my children when they came to see me.  (3) I struggle with transitions, that place of belonging neither here nor there, neither now nor then, of belonging to no place and no time.  I am glad this transition is ending.  (4) The last day in one place is as strange as first day in another.  (5) I did it!  I made it!  I lived alone for six years after a traumatic divorce.  And I made it through.  Intact, even!  Stronger!  I emerged from a long, dark tunnel of trauma into the light of life and love, and even created my own light along the way.

Courage at Twilight: Journals

I have kept a journal since I was a teenager in the late 1970s. My journal isn’t a diary of daily occurrences, but a collection of documents containing my thoughts, insights, struggles, joys, accomplishments, activities, and feelings, and those of others with whom I am closely connected, mostly family.  All these documents go into one-inch black three-ring binders, the dates printed on the spines, lined on my bookshelves.  Continue reading

Courage at Twilight: Food Storage

My church encourages its members to have on hand one year’s supply of food in case of emergency.  The Covid-19 pandemic affirmed that food storage isn’t a fool’s errand.  After being counseled my whole life, and after six months of Covid, I finally started acquiring food storage.  Not just staples, but things I would enjoy and that would be good for me.  Canned: refried beans; sweet potatoes; mackerel; sweet corn; green beans; mandarin oranges; spaghetti sauce; diced tomatoes; black beans.  Baking: flour; sugar; brown sugar; baking powder; corn meal; cassava flour; vegetable shortening; a gallon of vegetable oil; a gallon of corn syrup.  Spices: garlic; onion; cinnamon.  Bouillon cubes for chicken and beef broth.  Pasta: angel hair (my favorite).  Bottled water.  Powdered milk.  A stove in a can.  Two hundred tea candles and pint-jar lanterns.  I hope I don’t have to find out how long these stores, combined with their own, would last Mom, Dad, and me.  But I have them just in case, in boxes, on shelves in Mom’s basement cold storage room.

Courage at Twilight: Packing the Boxes

I packed 30 boxes in one night.  Packing boxes is such an odd life experience.  Into each box I put my books, my genealogical records, my decorations, my journals.  I seem to have more books and binders than any other type of possession.  I cannot bear to part with the good books I have read, so into the boxes they go, with the label “Books: Read.”  My latest favorites: The Plover by Brian Doyle, about a scarred sailor on a small sailboat who takes on several characters and through them heals his wounds; and, The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, about the pervasive systematic racist policies of U.S. Government agencies that caused African Americans to suffer gross inequities in housing availability and affordability, safe neighborhoods, good jobs, adequate incomes, quality schools, clean environments, loan and mortgage equity, wealth generation, and military benefits.  Each book has walked me in the shoes of great men and women, has taken me to new realms of science, has filled me with joy and sadness and that sick feeling that comes from reading about human cruelty.  And when my bookshelves are empty and the boxes are full, I feel empty and bereft, as if my compartmentalized personality has been divided into boxes with labels, packed away to be loaded onto a truck and driven to my knew home and stacked in a corner of the basement until this new chapter, of which I have barely turned the first page, has ended (and I hope it is a long chapter).  Then, I will carry the boxes again, still unopened, to some other domicile, where they will be unpacked and their contents organized on shelves and tables until my children come to care for me.

Courage at Twilight: Building Boxes

I didn’t go to Wal-Mart for boxes.  I went there for snacks, including cheddar fish crackers, for a day trip to see Disney’s Beauty and the Beast with Hannah at Tuacahn.  But there was the cheerful Pepperidge Farms lady collapsing boxes by the dozen, happy to give them to me when I asked.  Packing is always a daunting task, and it starts with building boxes.  With Ken Burns’ 20-hour Jazz playing b-bop and avant-garde, I started folding and taping flaps, and tossing the boxes in a heap.  I feel so sad for genius Charlie Parker, playing sax music from heaven while drugs dragged him down to a living hell, with death at 34.  At DVD’s end, the living room was a heap of empty cracker boxes, about to be filled with books I may never read but yet carry around by the decade.  My life feels about to be reduced to a stack of heavy boxes marked “books.”  But mine is a good life: I will have a safe, loving place to live with, and care for, my generous parents.  Safe places—that is what we should be building.  I guess it starts with building boxes.  Forty down; so many to go.

Good-Bye Clementine

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Clementine returned, thankfully.  And Boris moved out (or was eaten), thankfully.  Though Clementine’s company had been, in some sense, comforting to me, our dissimilar natures dictated that our relationship was not to last.  Sealing our fate was the fact that, after living with Clementine for three months, I had to move out in favor of paying tenants.  Moving from this drab little apartment felt traumatic to me because I had become accustomed to my situation and surroundings.  And I had found a silky, spindly-legged companion.  Clementine showed no emotion when I left, but hung unmoving, as always, in her corner.  I walked out, shut the door, and surrendered my key, leaving Clementine behind.

GOOD-BYE CLEMENTINE

Good-bye, Clementine.
I have to leave:
paying tenants, naturally,
take precedence. No doubt:
they will disinfect your corners,
wipe away your suspending threads;
they will squash you without
thought, flush you out
with swirling sewage.

What? No. You cannot come
with me. This is where you belong,
while you belong anywhere.

(Incredibly, the above-pictured spider appeared in my bathroom, in a corner of the ceiling near the shower, in the midst of my posting these Clementine poems.)

Chapter 2: To the Country

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–You deserve a palace made of gold. (But even a gold palace needs to be kept clean.)–
(Dad to Erin-8)

We moved to the country in the Spring of 1998.  Our new home offered so much room for the children to explore and play and run around.  They tromped through the tall, tan field grass making twisting paths that were not even visible from the house.  Once the children entered the grass they couldn’t see out (or be seen from without).  They were pioneers, blazing new trails in the wilderness, whacking at the grass with stick swords. Continue reading