five from ottawa

My shoulder is at about 85%. This week is one where I have to use it extensively—I have to finish packing, and more than just a box or two at a time. The shoulder will also have to support me while I lie on my side to paint the baseboards in the entry and in the entire upstairs (three bedrooms and a bath). The sight of those baseboards over the past two months has been an indictment every time I looked at them. My ice packs are back in my freezer, just in case I beat myself up a little too much. Myron reminds me that there is no rush here, but I am sick of this purgatory, of not knowing when we will move or where or how much it will cost us. The morning chill and yellow leaves in the yard remind me of what’s coming. No one in their right mind wants to move into Winnipeg after the snow has started.

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Myron does not have a Don Draper drawer. I have put off packing his office until the end because I wanted to preserve his privacy, even though there is almost nothing there to hide. A few years ago, a friend of mine lost her husband very young, and it was impossible for me to keep from imagining myself in her position, especially with the treacherous road Myron took to bike to work. I pictured myself opening a sticky, stubborn drawer of his massive desk and hearing it bark in protest that its master was gone. Now I open the drawers and wonder if any stray papers are things that I was never supposed to see. The Lifetime Drama subroutine in my brain says Gentle Man! So indulgent, so in love! Nothing to hide, not ever! Then it plays soap-operatic flights of music as Lifetime Drama subroutines do, and I think This is why the secret is always SO gutwrenching. Then I remember who I married and who I am, and I put the things in boxes and wrap them up with tape.

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The rain started late Friday night. Saturday morning I woke up early to a pearly gray dawn. Three hours later, it looked the same, as if time had stopped. Five hours later, six, and still the opalescent light. Everyone hid in their homes, and the park was silent. Everything was silent, really, except the rain against the shingles and eaves. I realized that I have been waiting for a rain like this, an all-day soul-soaking rain, for months now. Something in me is breathing more easily, and something else feels washed away.

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Wrapped around the capable, functional, washed-clean core of me is a double helix of panic and inevitability. Whichever crisis rises, it is immediately put down by remembering that everything is an eventuality. The house will be sold, the move will take place, it will all happen no matter how badly I might mess anything up. (Did I ever tell you about the time we filled out a form in pencil and the government employee called us you stupid kids?) It would be really great if the inevitability would hang around so that the panic would stop foaming up. I need an older gentleman, someone in his seventies who smells like coffee and mothballs, to chuck me on the shoulder and ask me what I’ve got to worry about, maybe call me toots or missy.

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Maybe I should be doing more Breathing In of the Air and Appreciation of the World Around Me. Doing more mindful eating instead of eating quick half-meals, taking more photographs. Maybe I should even be trying harder to sweep aside the clouds in my crystal ball and getting a better vision of what’s to come. Not doing this feels like yet another failure, though, and right now I am trying not to be hard on myself about failures. I am trying to be an accepter and say yes, that happened and trying not to dwell. I dwell, though. I am down in it. I feel completely alone. And then in his drawer, where I try to be careful with things without being nosy, I see a photo of myself, and I wonder how I could have ever felt alone, ever, ever.

what I did on my summer vacation

I am a summer girl. I love the way that everything slows down, the way the heat is an excuse for any self-indulgent behavior you can imagine. I look forward to it all winter long when the snow piles up and when I can’t sleep for shivering. This summer hit me like a baseball bat to the back of the neck, though. It was ushered in on the arm of shock and grief, and I’m pretty sure it tried to kill me. The only thing you can do sometimes when your inescapable friend tries to kill you is wait it out. So I did.

Look at this book. WHY do I still have this book? Because look at that faux-Nagel-style artwork. It has to go. But god, part of me still wants to keep it. John Waters would not throw this shit away, you know it. He would always keep reference to the truth about herpes.While I waited, I looked at thousands of pieces of paper I had carried with me through move after move. I’ve lived in a lot of places; I should have let these things go before now. I threw out all sorts of things that I had no business keeping for so long. The people in the neighborhood may very well have thought that I chopped Myron up into pieces and put him at the curb in one of those many black plastic trash bags. To keep myself focused, I read a lot of decluttering and minimalist blogs—not that I could ever be a true minimalist, but I do want to feel more strongly about the things I do have, and one way to do that is to have fewer things. I realized a lot of my possessions were curiosities, oddments that I wanted to rescue from used book stores or to remind me of some random Thursday night in college when we walked along the levee and sang Doors songs. Things that students gave to me, or my mother, or a waitress or a lover. And I felt strongly about so many of them that picking and choosing felt inappropriate to impossible—there was no way to rank things more important or less, sometimes. But moving—especially the kind of moving where you’re charged by the pound—will make you rapidly unsentimental about belongings. Almost a third of my books are not coming with me, and more mementos than I could tell you. I took a lot of photos before I let things go. Are they digital clutter? Maybe. But I’m more able to sweep a bunch of photos into my recycle bin than I am the article itself, so every bit that went into the trash was a success story.

It may surprise you to know that I left the house when I could no longer bear to look at papers. I did! I even left for some very good reasons. Back in June, I was selected to read at Blog Out Loud, and almost immediately after my selection I berated myself for having the balls to apply because then I had to go and actually read the post out loud, in public, with other people who were intimidatingly talented and funny. Lynn, the organizer, wrote a lovely intro to my blog and when the day came, I went down to the city, got my eyebrows done, and finally got to give a big hug to Patti, Allison, and Karen. I read to the group about my mother and the kitchen at home, and I managed not to cry, and I was glad that more people got to know her, even that little bit. One of the saddest things about leaving Ottawa is that I won’t be able to do this again, but I was so grateful to do it this year.

And then there was Social Capital, which packed my brain full of so much information and strategy. You may not know this, but I only reluctantly started a Twitter account in order to volunteer for Reverb10, even though plenty of people told me I would enjoy it. And boy howdy, look at me now. I went to the conference hoping to gain new perspectives for a potential next round of The Scintilla Project and wound up with so much more than I bargained for. Most of the discussion there had to do with social media as used by organizations and companies, but in two sessions I gained deep insight into the mechanics of sharing what I share on a personal blog, one that I have no intention of monetizing in any way outside of the occasional free book that I may or may not review. Sometimes amid the swirling miasma of what passes for Meta-Blog Discussion and Advice, the personal blog is the bastard stepchild, especially when the sidebar isn’t given over to advertising. After the conference, I was proud of what I’ve accomplished here, both as a partner in a shared blog and now on my own, and I have a renewed energy for what I hope to accomplish here once I’m settled into the new house. (Also, we gossiped about you. Yes, you.) I’m super grateful to the organizing committee for putting on such a rewarding event, one that I would love to come back for next year.

In the heat of it all, I jumped on a bus and went to Montreal to meet Shakti when she came up for a visit. For all the time I’ve lived here, Myron kept saying we would make it to Montreal for a long weekend, and it never happened. This has always been maddening, because Montreal is so temptingly close. I got to do two wonderful things at once—immerse myself in a glorious old city and spend a few hours with my vibrant, whip-smart, and beautiful friend. I should have taken her photo—don’t ask me where my brain was at the time—but I’m glad I got the chance to be with Shakti amid the wild street theatre, the gorgeous architecture, the thousand perfect typefaces, the people, and all the beauty. I can’t wait until I get back there, especially if luck and timing align so that I can walk those cobbled streets with the nip of autumn in the air.

In between all of this were smaller summer moments. Tending a lawn that crisped up beyond recognition during a record-breaking drought, coordinating the various upgrades to the house, lunches out with Patti, Allison, and Karen, days in the city, sunshine blasting a sandal tan into the tops of my feet, a long weekend visit with Myron. I took a fair amount of August Break pictures, which may have bored some of you to distraction, but I say again, “break”. There was bad stuff, too: the incident with the pinched nerve that is only just now allowing me to function and pack again, the friend-of-a-friend handyman whose “repairs” to our front steps caused us even more expense and work, the relentless humidity that had me wondering how I could have ever thought I wanted to move back to Georgia. But it’s September now, and summer’s on its way out, and my to-do list has gotten shockingly shorter. Things are coming to an end here. And I will say that again and again over the next two months, but I’m still wrapping my head around it. I have lived in this townhouse longer than anyplace I’ve lived since the house where I grew up. Inertia doesn’t want to let me shuck off the moss just yet.

#augustbreak: detritus

This is going to be my last August Break post, so that I can get back into writing more. But this is a wonderful way for it to end—with the old eavestroughs (US: gutters) finally coming down and new ones going up noisily around me as I type. They look like old bones scattered across the lawn. The roof being finally done is a huge milestone, and my to-do list gets shorter and shorter all the time. Note the leaves coming down from my neighbor’s tree. Maybe I can put up my autumn logo soon, after all. (Thanks, Onyi, for the idea. You have some incredible timing.)

#augustbreak: unchained

The way I complain about this move you’d think I’d never done it before. But I’ve had lots of keys in my time, and I’ve sentimentally kept them long after I should have. I tossed them on a binder, shot them, and threw them away. You can’t go back, you just can’t.

#augustbreak: thirteen + thirteen + thirteen

I remember thirteen. I remember twenty-six. If it occurred to me then to look ahead to thirty-nine, I’m pretty sure I thought I’d have everything wrapped up by now and that I would feel well and truly grown. That I would know who I was, instead of just knowing a handful of things that I’m not.

Birthdays are as weird and arbitrary as can be. These days, they aren’t about me so much as my mother—it was her big day back then, when I was coming into the world while General Hospital was on. (Ruining your plans since Day One, that’s me.) I’m sad to miss out on her telling me my ridiculous birth story every year, I’m sad to spend the day without her singing “Buon Compleanno” to me in her I-will-do-anything-to-make-you-laugh voice. My friends swoop in and remind me how much I am truly loved on a birthday without her. My grandmother calls and lets me cry to her about the pain (my god! the pain) in my shoulder and the dozen things that have gone so expensively wrong already during this moving process. She remembers just enough of the birth story to recount it for me, to laugh at my dad’s devastating comic timing and the way he lightened the mood while everyone else panicked. I haven’t cried to my Grammy in years, but it felt okay to be thirteen upon thirteen upon thirteen and doing it just then, and to believe her when she said that everything would be all right.

My mom didn’t get to keep my dad very long and she was very careful with the treasures he gave her during their time together. In her photo albums, she kept the little florist’s cards from every bouquet he gave her, and there were many bouquets in that short time. (There were not enough; there could never have been enough when you lose your husband young.) I used to read them and trace my fingers over his signature when I was little. So precious. This is something people throw away, some people.

By the end of the day, I had my own bouquet and my own florist’s card, and I do not have thirty-nine figured out, or much of anything else, really. I do know that more ill-equipped people than me have sold houses and survived a pinched nerve (my god! the pain! you think I’m kidding!) and that once upon a time I myself was one of the Together People. I lived that delusion. And now I am okay with the fog of mystery and tiny orange roses and the weight of this year. If I had everything figured out, there’d be nothing to entertain me for the rest of my time here. You can build a lot of life out of knowing a few things that you’re not.