Looking for a point
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One more thing on the plate
Covid caused us to put off last spring’s anticipated yard sale, which was to help us reduce some of our excess possessions. Now we realize if we sell this house before May, when the yard sale seasons begins, we need to choose whether to move our excess items to our daughter’s and have a yard sale there or to take them to Goodwill or the dump instead.
Quite simply, do we feel we’re up for investing the time and effort in preparing and conducting a sale? (As well as the tedious job of cleaning up afterward?) How much do we want to reasonably rake in if we do?
In either case, I don’t want to pack up a bunch of stuff “to get to later,” meaning sometime after hauling it five hours northeast. Or wherever.
Note to self: Energy applied now saves double or triple that amount later.
Facing up to downsizing
After nearly 21 years in the same house – the one with the small red barn – we’ve come to a difficult decision.
It’s time to move on. Not only is the place too big for just the two of us – remember, there were once five us of living here – it’s also eating up too much of our retirement budget and time. We can’t continue to watch our meagre savings shrinking. For that matter, we can’t even keep up with the gardening and cleaning routines, not if we’re going to indulge in the other desired things on our proverbial plate. An estimate for reroofing the house may have been the tipping point.
We’ve run the numbers of having others renting space here or trying to swap what we own for something smaller close by, and we do love the community, as you’ve gathered from reading the blog, but no enticing alternative has jumped out. Dover’s simply a very hot housing market at the moment.
What has caught our fancy, thanks to a daughter’s investigation, is a small down-on-the-heels city on the ocean at the other end of Maine – one with an active arts community and a nearby Quaker meeting. It is as far from where we are now as is Manhattan in the opposite direction – a five-hour-plus drive. Half of the townships you pass though in the last two hours of that route are uninhabited, except for the black flies, mosquitos, and moose.
Even without that prompting, we still need to sort through our possessions and cull what we can. It’s not just clutter, either. So much of this is essentially frozen time – things we thought we’d want to get to someday or debris from the past, souvenirs we probably won’t ever revisit again. (There’s more on decluttering on my Chicken Farmer blog.)
The key question we’re asking ourselves, “Is this something I’ll need or use in the next five years?” Or, for that matter, really miss.
And so, independently, we’ve started. No matter how liberating the task ultimately becomes, getting there is often painful.
In our case, it’s a multistage process, as I’ll discuss in future posts.
We’ve started with the books, mostly, because there are so many of them and they occupy the most space. They’re also heavy to move.
After that we get to clothing, kitchen goods, garden and home maintenance tools, our personal collections.
For me, that leads to writing supplies and files, concert program notes and playbills from events I’ve attended, my vinyl, CD, and tape recordings.
Here’s another consideration of your worldly possessions
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.
Anyone else using the DuckDuckGo search engine?
Always a contrarian with an aversion to Big Brother, I’ve been open to alternatives to Google for online research. Still, it seems to come up with the broadest results.
Lately, though, I’ve been relying on DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/) as an alternative, largely on its promises to keep my wanderings more private. What I am finding interesting is the fact that it comes up with a different swath of results than Google does.
Yes, I still turn to Google, no apologies, but I do like getting off the freeway, if you know what I mean.
I am curious about other search engines other folks are using – and why.
What are your search engine preferences?
Unpacking the past, opening space to move on
I’ve been up in the loft of the barn, going through many of my goods that have been packed away here. These days, the temperature’s not too hot, and though the air’s chilly outside, the sun on the roof has this space comfy. The wind sends maple spinners tapping overhead, as well as falling leaves and twigs. For me, it’s autumn in more ways than one.
I’ve already gone through my spirituality/religion bookshelf in my studio in the house and pruned nearly a hundred volumes from it – mostly Yoga and Buddhism I’ll no longer be referencing in new writing. I look one last time at these field guides and backcountry maps from across the continent while hoping to find an appreciative reader to give them to. Any ideas?
Alas, I’m finding more books here in the barn, some of them adding to that pile, but also Whole Earth Catalogs, political science, poetry, marketing and agenting guides, art and history, Cascade Mountains trail books and photo albums. Each of them is a reflection of my life’s interests and pursuits, now in my past.
There are also picture frames we’ve never used, rolled-up posters, Quaker outreach materials.
At least I went ahead and burned the outdated assorted financial records a few days ago – credit cards slips, receipts, insurance mailings, and so on. Shredding them would have taken forever.
And then correspondence and photos. What to keep and what to release?
The point is that it’s time to let go and move on.
Soon to follow are the genealogical working notes and files. Four filing boxes stuffed with them. Everything I’ve gleaned is now up on my Orphan George blog. Another completed project, as far as I’m concerned. Yet when I open one of the boxes, I feel myself burdened with some constricting force, likely arising in a self-imposed obligation. No, the time has come.
Along with another filing box of poetry and fiction acceptances and correspondence. I discarded the rejections long ago. I hate to think how much I spent on postage and photocopying in that pastime or of the hours I devoted to it before I shifted my output to blogging and self-published ebooks.
More symbolic is my old backpack basket, at one time a status item reflecting my reaching first-class rank in Boy Scouts and, along with it, the right to weave the basket and attach it to the frame I made when I had earned second-class. It no longer fits and has long been battered in my moves across the continent. Besides, I won’t be backpacking again. With it, I learned to back light in my travels. Farewell, then, as I pack light anew.
Not everything up here is mine, but we are on a downsizing effort.
~*~
I have to admit feelings of failure, of seeing how often I was compelled to move away and start over just as something else was about to open. Of near-misses, too. Of broken relationships.
But there’s also the warmth of past friendships and support. Long, personal letters from busy people, for one thing, something that’s really from a different era than the one we inhabit now. Of deceased elders and mentors, especially.
I have moments of sensing this as a prelude to the aftermath of my own funeral, a kind of this-was-your-life sweep. As I do the work of clearing out things I’ve treasured that won’t mean anything to anyone among my family and friends, I spare them the task. There will be plenty enough as when I’m done, far as I can see.
It’s bittersweet, really, making room for what’s left. Nobody said it would be easy.
It came as a harsh realization
I have no fondness for any of the offices I’ve worked in. They were all impersonal, and for the most part institutional. The best one, on a college campus, was a former dormitory room with painted concrete-block walls. The newsrooms were more like sweatshops. One, at least, made an effort in remodeling, but there were some other negative factors.
A few of my home writing spaces stand a notch higher, though I had some where I sat cross-legged on the floor to type.
Well, come to think of it, the one I really miss is the second-floor studio I converted from a bedroom in the townhouse I rented on the hilltop in Manchester. Everything was in reach there, and I did have a good view of the street and sky. Not that my current third-floor lair is anything to complain about, apart from running up against the sloping ceiling.
I really had dreamed about converting the top of the barn into my author’s haven but see no need to do that these days. The fact is, we really need to downsize, now that it’s just the two of us rather than five. And now that my work’s mostly digital, I don’t require as much storage space for filing cabinets and mailing supplies.
How about your own working spaces? Employment? Kitchen? Workshop? Hobbies?
Simple elegance
When the price per pound comes down
1 a.m., thinking of the past
I smell a skunk crossing darkness, somewhere outside the dark window.
Jnana's Red Barn 