Tag: Transitions

I’m feeling suspended in time, as in limbo

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

A curious set of emotions has set in for me. As much as I love living in Dover, I feel myself separating from it. There’s a sadness, as well as the excitement of new adventure ahead, though we have no idea exactly how soon.

Next week? Next month? Next spring or summer? We don’t know yet.

We had enough surprises in trying to buy this place, in what seems a life ago to me.

So I anticipate a crush of time-consuming work ahead in packing and then unpacking our goods, as well as the rounds of changing address and establishing new connections, and that in turn has me hesitating to step up to volunteer for tasks in the groups where I’m a member. Yes, I’m distancing.

It’s happening at home, too.

Moving around the garden, for instance, when we realized we wouldn’t replant garlic bulbs this fall, not here. Or looking at my fern beds and asparagus patch, knowing I’ll definitely miss them.

Or facing household breakdowns, which seem to be multiplying. You know, let repairing them become someone else’s problem. They probably wouldn’t like the color of paint we use, anyway.

Things we’ve never really liked about the house itself but somehow accepted now are acknowledged as irritants. That sort of thing.

I keep thinking we could easily pour another hundred grand into this domicile, if we had that much, but it would never be want we really want or, at this point in our lives, fit what we need.

This all feels so strange, given that I’d settled into a kind of familiar lazy comfort with things.

All of them about to be uprooted.

A time for redirection in my own life

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

One of my annual practices around now used to be crafting a seasonal itinerary for the coming year, one that included goals for each of the major components of my life – Writing/Creative, Quaker, Relationships, Household – that sort of thing. It was kind of like budgeting, but with a focus mostly on time and dreams.

Closely related was a consideration of what kind of schedule I wanted to follow once I retired or somehow otherwise achieved financial freedom. You know, maybe having a bestseller novel break out to fund it all.

The one thing I realized each time I attempted the planning was that there would never be sufficient time for everything I deemed important. And, as my wife pointed out, there were a lot of mundane tasks I wasn’t even considering.

Looking back, I’m rather embarrassed by what I’m seeing. One thing for sure is that little of my life since retiring is anything like what I had anticipated. I had no idea how much my stamina and self-discipline would be flagging. During the earlier thinking, blogging wasn’t even on the horizon nor was choir or daily swimming. (Well, the latter two are currently off, given Covid.) I’m still not meditating or doing hatha yoga daily, either.

Much of the time has been taken up with the self-publication and promotion of my novels as ebooks, and later, with the deep drafting and revisions of What’s Left, which in turn prompted drastic reworking and even renaming of my earlier fiction. Releasing those in both Kindle and paperbook at Amazon last summer came as a HUGE relief. In many ways, I felt I was done.

Or almost.

What I wanted to do was reshape my daily, weekly, and even annual routines. What are my goals and dreams now? What do I need to do, too, to maintain a suitable living situation? Some of it was even reexamining my self-identities and lifestyle. Well, before I retired I had hoped to take a retreat at a monastery or some such to ponder these bigger issues. Was this now the time?

Instead, I glanced at what I want to do here on WordPress in the coming year, and that prompted several months of heavy writing and scheduling of posts. You know, clear the deck, for the most part. Frankly, it’s been more time-consuming labor than I expected, no matter how much I enjoy doing it.

The thought even crossed my mind: What if I stopped blogging altogether? What would I do with the free time? (Would that leave me feeling retired?)

The latest unanticipated turn, though somehow fitting into this refocusing, has arisen in the joint decision to downsize and relocate. It just might lead to a time of isolation and retreat for me, too. We’ll see how things shake out.

Yes, indeed.

As for those dreams

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My wife’s long dreamed of living on an island and had come close to making that a reality. She’s still pained by the way that came apart, back before she met me. Well, indirectly it’s a reason we came together.

So here we are, finally with a destination that’s technically an island, one connected to the mainland by a causeway rather than a ferry.

As for me, Downeast Maine – the lands and waters east of fashionable Acadia and Bar Harbor – reminds me of the Far West, with its long distances to anywhere, the wilds and wildlife, and opportunities to explore nature. But our destination also has a lively arts scene, one that reminds me of Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula, back in the early ’80s.

Leaving the Pacific Northwest crushed a passion and way of life, something I’m feeling rekindled in this new setting.

No, it’s not Alaska or the coast of British Columbia and there are no glacier-glad mountains, but the vibe’s right. For that matter, I’m not up for that degree of isolation in my life at this stage.

Somehow, though, this is exciting.

~*~

For us, it’s not quite as simple as packing everything onto a boat and landing at a new dock.

Instead, we’re relocating in stages, eventually merging two households into one. Two households with barns, to an old Cape without one.

Whatever we keep will be strategic, for sure. And yes, it will still be lined with books, lots of them.

One more thing on the plate

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

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

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

 

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.