Hello Friend,
Thank you so much for stopping in. Please excuse the bit of chaos. You’ll have to navigate a moving-box obstacle course, some packed and ready to go, others waiting to be filled.
Let me shove these ones aside so we have this little space to sit in the bay window. No fresh baking today, but I have tea a-plenty, and a couple of just-bought chocolate chip cookies. Help yourself.
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I’m taking artwork and portraits off the walls today, as you can see. The house slowly loses more of itself with every piece that comes down. Perhaps it’s truer to say that it loses more of us, of our personality and identity. I wonder to myself how the new owners will make it their own. What part of themselves will hang on these walls? Dear house, you have been so good to us.
The other day Little Munch, age four, asked me why we don’t like our house anymore. It brought me up short. Do we not like our house? I concluded in the split second way of thoughts that we do indeed like our house. The simplest in-the-moment-four-year-old-understandable answer was that we want to move back to the country. And so I explained to Munch. He was satisfied. (But the more in depth answer is here if you’re interested.)
We have settled on a moving date, and while The Cowboy continues to work out at The Cleft to have it ready for us, I have three weeks to finish packing. I’ve done a lot of packing in my lifetime. I actually enjoy it when I have the luxury to take my time with it, and it seems I need more time nowadays than when I was younger.
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Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
Franz Kafka
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Will you have more tea? I would have liked to serve you cake fresh from the oven, but at the last minute I realized that we’d packed the vanilla. And also, all of the cake pans. Well, one can’t fore-think everything I suppose.
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When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.
Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice
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All except a few of the books in my library have been packed and carted out to The Cleft. Interestingly, the books left behind are mostly poetry, as though somewhere in my innermost self I knew I’d need the grounding of profound words in this time of upheaval.
Having a library of my own was always a dream of mine, and so I have consciously built it over the years. However, I never consciously built up a collection of art. “Consciously” being the key word here.
I realize, as I’ve taken pictures and artwork off the walls and carefully wrapped them, that we have built up a small collection of art after all. Pieces that we love. Pieces picked up here and there, over the years, as they captured our attention and we could afford them. Quite remarkable really. I find myself pleasantly surprised about it all. But I also find myself wondering whether I missed out on something special by not making a plan to build a collection and actively searching out just the right pieces. Would I have chosen differently? Would we have a more cohesive collection? Is there such a thing?
Oh how the mind wanders in wonders while packing.
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One day you will look back and see that all along you were blooming.
Morgan Harper Nichols
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I really don’t want to cut our visit short, it was so wonderful to have you drop in. I hope you come again. Maybe your next visit will be to The Cleft, where you will always be welcome.
See you next time, and stay safe out there.
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All photos courtesy of Pixabay.
