My parents and my kids and I are all still alive and healthy, as are my cats, Marten and Willow. They still hate each other. Yesterday Marten brought me a live garter snake.
My son married his lovely girlfriend (now his lovely wife: still lovely) and my daughter and her (reliable and attractive) boyfriend of some ten years have moved to Hudson, MA (almost exactly the same distance from here as it was when she was in college). Doug is married to the very nice Barb and lives more and more of the time in Connecticut, with former kittens Wash and Mal.
I have a Tumblr. My real-person Tumblr is
And today I signed papers to put my house in the New Hampshire countryside on the market, where I have lived for the past (exactly) nine years, because it's too big and the taxes are killing me and I don't have the oomph I I did when I moved in (or the beloved (not even that kind of beloved, damn it) housemates who have needed to live elsewhere.
I love the birds (best feeder birds ever, for me) and the quiet and the visual beauty and I have no idea where I should go next (because I also Need a Job). My parents live in Boston, my kids in greater Boston, and I really don't want to live in Massachusetts again (It's much more thickly populated, hotter, more humid, and more expensive than NH; but my parents are getting a lot older). Probably an apartment in Concord?
I am going to have to pack or, ideally, get rid of say, half my possessions? of which way too many are books. I don't mind divesting from the gardening supplies and the sort of things you need if you have a house (a circular saw) and I can probably get rid of the books I haven't touched in more than a couple of years... but I have been reading an awful lot of fanfic and you wonder if sometime you won't want the murder mysteries or science fiction you liked to reread again (except you will probably go reread At Least There's the Football or Katie Forsythe/Wordstrings or one of the other infinitely warm mostly safe places; but what if one day you OD on Sherlock Holmes?). And don't tell me libraries, because they are terrible places for pulp science fiction and moderately cozy mysteries.
And the archaeology that someone broke your heart and fired you and made you very angry and disappointed in them, so you don't really give a damn about the original settlement of North and South America. 15000 K BCE as much as you used to... to say nothing of not putting up a Christmas tree for the last three years because I go to my parents' and imagine at some point I'll go to my kids'.
The things I need to cull are full of emotional freight and it got to me today, a bit, signing the papers to say yeah, I'm letting go of a lot (I shall not miss the money-eating driveway).
But while I was putting off tidying (ineffectually) for the real estate agent I wrote a 221B that made several people laugh and got kudos from some writers I admire and some of the comments made ME laugh and my fandom may not be at hand by God it's real and it counts.
1 comment:
sometimes I dream of the zen of owning very little, or just what I need (what is that?) but then I go and make another bag to throw in the bins of bags I have made and know I am lost. Tools, materials to work with and books. And a few dishes. Perhaps something to wear. And books. See?
Good luck. Best of luck, in fact, and happy landing.
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