Here’s another consideration of your worldly possessions

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

If your house caught fire, what would you miss most?
Or, if you had time, what’s the first thing you would you save?

You know, that Dolley Madison thing of grabbing the portrait of Washington when the White House was burning. (OK, a slave actually deserves the credit, but back to the point.)

I have to admit that having so much of my work now backed up in the cloud, rather than on paper, greatly refocuses my response here.

My journals would be a big loss – there are too many to take them out all at once.

Other people would top the list, and after that, whatever’s closest at hand, probably starting with my laptop.

Among the non-family members in his past, the one now called Liz

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As Cassia delves into her father’s photo negatives in my novel What’s Left, she’s bound to come up with a slew of Liz, who became his first lover.

Somewhere there’s also the experimental short movie he made, the one that made the rounds of avant-garde showings. The one featuring Liz’s shimmering breast.

Cassia’s aunt Nita had been Liz’ dorm roommate when the whole thing began. She’d tell her niece plenty, should the kid ask. She’s also a central figure in Daffodil Uprising and Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.

~*~

Romantic love is only one of the options when it comes to emotional spiraling.

Could you tell about telling me of some event that knocked the floor out from under your feet?

~*~

Cassia’s roots included inspiration like this Orthodox icon of Saint Agatha. Via Wikimedia Commons.

~*~

 

What I don’t like about November

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Here we are!

  1. Election Day. How can so many Americans be so dumb, so often, these days? Once in a while, I’m surprised by a miracle.
  2. The time change. Moving the clocks back from so-called Daylight Savings is the real beginning of winter. Where I live, it means sunset in the middle of the afternoon. How depressing!
  3. The foliage is gone. The trees are naked. The landscape’s turned black-and-white for most days.
  4. It’s cold. The fact is, we have to get used to the falling temperatures. It always comes as a shock. By the time we get to February, the same readings will seem balmy.
  5. Christmas songs and décor everywhere. It’s all a big retailing push. It’s not even Advent until the 29th this year – or the end of the month. It’s SO wrong! And remember, the Twelve Days of Christmas aren’t a shopping countdown – they begin on Christmas Day itself.
  6. Garden cleanup. OK, it’s not all bad. Harvesting the root crops can actually be fun. But turning off the water to the outdoor faucets, emptying the hoses and taking them to the loft of the barn, collecting fallen leaves, bringing the hammock in, along with other outdoor furniture and the ceramic pots, can get tedious.
  7. Putting up outside Christmas lighting. I prefer getting this done before it turns into a knuckle-freezing trial.
  8. No more yard sales. My wife’s pretty good at finding things on my everyday shopping list at way-below-retail on most Saturday mornings. Alas, any new items will have to wait till May.
  9. I have to clean ash from the wood-burning stove. It needs to be done every-other-day, at the least.
  10. Can’t sit in the loft of the barn. Not for long. And even then, I can’t leave the hayloft door open.

~*~

What about you?

Random thoughts while sorting through what’s been squirrelled away

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

When we first moved to our home, I had dreams of converting the loft of the barn into my own palatial writer’s studio, replete with shelves of books and a bank of filing cabinets. I recalled what critic and English professor Jack Barnes had done at his farmhouse in Hiram, Maine, and was envious. In some ways, it would have been an extension of how I’d transformed what normally would have been the bedroom in my rented townhouse on the highest hill in Manchester before making the big leap that included this barn.

Several things changed during the two decades since then.

One was the shift from paper to digital, not exactly planned but let’s say inevitable, by stages. Submissions to editors and publishers no longer required printed manuscripts, for example, and with that came less need for envelopes, filing drawers of copies and correspondence. That in itself has meant I’m needing a lot less physical space to work in.

Another was our entering an empty-nest situation as the girls moved away and then my mother-in-law passed.

Financially, of course, converting the loft to year-round use was an expense I could no longer justify. Besides, why would I want to be isolated there when I had the top of the house to work in?

Realistically, my aspirations of becoming a successful author – meaning a sustainable income from royalties, workshops and appearances, and editing or coaching – never materialized. Along with that went my need for what would have been, in effect, a large office.

~*~

So here I am, in what became a kind of seasonal treehouse, one filled with things that didn’t fit into our house itself, not all of them mine, by a long shot. I’m blowing off dust and spiders while sorting through boxes, cartons, and shelves before the weather gets too cold to work up here. See this as plugging through time, past, present, and future. How many opportunities have I blown or got buried by other demands on my attention? How did we do as much as we did? Whatever happened to so-and-so? Still, I feel no impulse to reconnect in person. The time for that has long passed.

As for the open area on the floor? When’s the last time I’ve done hatha yoga? Yet one more anticipated activity that never came to fruition.

~*~

Down from the wall comes an Amish hat, the one with hole in the crown. It no longer fit that self-identity anymore, not the Plain Quaker style and practice. Out it goes, then.

Same for the three-D topographical map of the Cascade Range and Yakima. I won’t be hiking those trails anymore. Anything I do will be somewhere in Maine. Besides, if I want to check a detail, these days there’s always the Internet.

I had come to a point where I couldn’t imagine how anyone could live without a barn, or so I joked, but now I’m about to be reminded it’s possible. Others in our entourage, however, are scouting out storage units as a way of buying more time to do triage on their own possessions in the developments of any pending deal.