MAKING NUMBER 8 CHOCOLATES

It was eight years ago that I began to think the very dark thought that Ted might die, and soon. 

We knew he had pancreatic cancer for more than a year when that thought crept into my head for the first time.  Up until that thought, I believed he would somehow learn to live with it, and our life together would go on as before.  

The date of his death is March 29, 2009 -- two days shy of his sixty-first birthday.  I am about to turn sixty-two in April.  It feels very strange to live longer than Ted lived.  This idea is out of reach for me.  I live with something right next to my body that isn't there.  I feel it.  I have started to privately think of it as The Big Empty.

Death is not the only killer around.  I remember reading about a traumatized and amnesiac woman arriving by bus to NYC in the seventies, with no idea how to live or who she was.  She knew one thing for certain -- she loved chocolate and she deep-wired knew how to make it.  She found work with a chocolatier and eventually ran her own operation. 

She didn't die -- just most of her life and previous identity did.


As my own March 29 anniversary date approaches, I view my days at a distance, as if through the lens of a drone above myself. 

I see myself writing, housekeeping, caring for my dogs.  There are always library hauls and reading -- with background familiar noise of John Wayne/John Ford Westerns or such, playing on Amazon Prime.  Sometimes I tune to Pandora stations like Johnny Cash and sometimes Pavarotti. 

I think I am lucky that I'm not a sit-still person, and yet I am miserable at intentional exercise. 

I take continuing education classes.  My most recent class was on strength training exercises using a big red rubber band.  I think I misplaced the band down my shirt three times during class and recognized myself for who I continuously turn out to be.  When the class was over, I knew I was lucky no one had been injured.

My working motto at the moment:  "Thank Goodness I'll Never Have to See Those People Again".

Everything changed when Ted died, except for some essentials about myself, such as:

• Still attempt to accomplish feats I have attempted many times, and failed. 
• Still in love with the public library, still a reading addict. 
• Write multiple times a day -- lists and books and notes to self and letters and emails to others. 
• Enjoy a wide range of music so long as it somehow tells a story. 
• Think of Ted and want him here with me throughout every single day. 
• Live with dogs -- now, with dogs Ted never had a chance to trip over and love.

Every day is a pieced-together textile with the main impetus of staying busy behind it. 

I am sometimes asked how to begin again, after loss and grief take your life away and you have to keep on living.  I have written a new book about that, and it will be for sale on Amazon in two weeks or so.  My book, "Baptized Every Morning", is a guidepost, journal and sketchbook about starting over after loss and grief wipe you out. 

Now that this book is almost finished, I have started working on my next book.  It will be about a prostitute and madam, living a century ago.  The research is beguiling to me.

Recently, I joined a local rock and gem club and have been rockhounding and polishing finds in my rock tumbler.  My ten-year-old grandson, Julian, is also a member of this club.  We share the unique joy of understanding rocks and how they came to be.  He got a rock tumbler for Christmas and just finished polishing his first batch.  Gorgeous -- especially the Tiger Eyes. 

Julian's Polished Tiger Eyes!

It is exciting to watch his collection grow as I grow my own, and share the thrill of the hunt.  Julian has a deep understanding of the chemical compositions, of elements and atomic weights.  I learn a lot from him in that regard.  I've been a rock collector most of my adult life, but being around a young rockhound has reignited my enthusiasm -- especially for finding and polishing agates and jaspers. 

I like to hunt rocks on the beach.

Yep.  I stay busy.  A new book, nearing publication.  Another book underway.  A beloved grandson with me in rockhounding and rock polishing.  A big family near, including six grandchildren, three adult kids and their spouses.  Elements of myself that go way back, like music, reading and the dread of deliberate exercise.  These old friends have been true. 

My pieced together, new way of living is busy.  It is even what you might call full. 

I wish there was a way for me to say otherwise, but there is an emptiness to my life that never goes away.  Not ever. 

This is my brand of widow, today.

My gratitude list is long. 


Love.
Family.
Rocks. 
Music. 
Dogs.
Writing.
Books. 

Gratitude, even, for continuous companionship of The Big Empty. 

HELLO GOODBYE TO CHEESED-OFF FOSSILS

{Fossils (from Classical Latin fossilis; literally, "obtained by digging") are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past.} 

If it is December, I am culling.

Drawers, closets, walls, garage, shed.

Every December, I find myself relearning why it is painful to discard certain objects.

Letting go of objects I once dearly longed for is a form of self-burial.   It can be tear-jerking to see clearly that one's old self is constantly withering.  Withered.  Blown. 

I used to sell objects in an antique booth and sometimes on-line, so culling was made into a business function and not as emotional. 

Once upon a time I had the energy to host a two-day garage sale every year.  Bury that me. 

If my grown kids don't want something discarded, it is thrift store bound.  When I see my goodbye-thing on the thrift store shelf with a price tag affixed, I am viewing a fossil.  It is clear evidence of something that was once alive.

Xiphanctinus Molossus once swam in the sea

that covered present day Kansas

Without fossils, the state we know as Kansas might be less of a wonder.  Millions of years ago it was underwater, with fishes and air dwellers thinking everything was going along rather swimmingly.  Presto! Chango! and today I can visit a gnarly-toothed extinction of a fish any time I like in a fossil museum.  Everything is under glass.  People like to hover and watch over fossils the way a miser watches over a scarecrow in order to inherit his clothes.   There is something about a fossil that has to be had.  Every fossil knows a secret.    Tell me.

What a glory it must be to be admired and respected for the imprint one has left behind.  

When I look at the exalted state that is any fossil, I feel a particular longing for a mission in my own life that will leave an admirable imprint a million or so years along.   Now that I am retired from working, I feel torn. 

Real and lasting meaning and value to the world

VS

Having unplanned fun full-time   

I am feeling CHEESED OFF, a British phrase meaning waiting too long for an important mission -- or, in my case, wanting to find a way to leave a lasting imprint.

Perhaps living alone spares me from the daily mission of living peacefully with another individual, and robs me of a bigger sense of purpose on a daily basis.   Now that I've written the previous twenty-eight words, I feel a cynical laugh building inside of lonesome me. 

I have fossil envy.  It's not the first time, and it probably won't be the last. 

Dearest You:

Once you had died and your body taken away from this place, I did a few things that are now extinct, so far as I know.  One is that I took clear packing tape in a red plastic dispenser and went around the house, lifting your fingerprints.  Fingerprints on counters, on glassware, appliances and doors.  I hung them on a kite-string line and memorized the swirls and the dips.  At last I knew that I could not differentiate your prints from mine and that of visitors near the end.  For the life of me now I cannot recall where these packing tape artifacts are.  I don't even live in the same house as these made up, strung up, taped up, transparent banners of unidentifiable fingerprints.  They are fossils for a distant epoch to dig up and re-string, possibly for all to admire. 

*************

TIME has turned the corner again and it is now an impossible accumulation of years:  2017.
 Eight years since there was dearest you whose fingerprints co-mingled with my own. 

I am still thinning out the fossilized possessions of that forever lifetime together, a ways ago and a ways ahead.
 

THE BONES OF THANKSGIVING AND DRIFTWOOD ERRATICS

The last month or so will now and forever be marked in my memory as Election-Thanksgiving Season.  It has left me both shaken and stirred. 

I am an emotional martini.

At least three times so far this Election-Thanksgiving season I watched The Searchers for comfort and grounding.  A scene features Mrs. Jorgenson (played by the late Harry Carey's widow, Olive), describing a "Texican" as "a human man, out on a limb."

She goes on to talk about this, her home place.  She notes that it will still be such, even after many bones are in the ground. 

Yes.  Election-Thanksgiving season rattled bones.

Election season: tidal, moon-pull, vast, blind man's bluff.   

Here is me at high tide:

I want to read your election posts and rants and finger wagging and I'm right there with you and I like you and sometimes heart you on social media.  I scroll down to find everyone's rants, posts, latest scriptures and morality plays.  I try to find some way of fitting in while privately resonating with some of the aspects of other views.   Is everybody okay with how I think?  I promise not to mention that I listen to the other side and think about that too.

Me at low tide:

You will not be hearing from me.  I don't plan to ever, ever log onto my computer again.  I'll duck in to pay my bills, duck out.  I'll play Words with Friends, but that's it.  I am not on a side and I am not following you or anyone, Anymore, Ever, Period, Amen. Privately, I feel lousy and worried that I'm taking full advantage of Life In America the Beautiful but I'm not pitching in properly (i.e. Taking A Strident Never Wavering Ever Stand and Blaring About It). 

While the election tide is shifting continuously, I feel lonely for my homeland.  Being an American, to me, used to feel like an exhilarating airplane ride over amber waves of grain.  Now, it feels like a shouting match in which nothing ever gets settled while everybody's everything and the house we all live in burns down.   

When the election was finally over (sort of), Thanksgiving loomed.  For me, since Ted died, that particular day is an awkward day of avoidance and unwelcome feelings of free-floating melancholy. 

Melancholy -- from the Greek -- literally meaning the remembrance of past pain.  It's the feeling of homelessness in my own home. 

Ted and I always parlayed the four free days off work we received for Thanksgiving with three vacation days to have nine days of beach time with the kids and dogs.  We traveled to Lincoln City, Oregon in all kinds of weather and threats of tidal driftwood injury.

Our Thanksgiving lasted a week and consisted of getting up, getting wet from frolicking, drying our clothes on the wood stove, watching waves from a window while eating Bugels or Cheetos, redressing, getting beach wet again, drying our clothes on the wood stove and going to bed.  Our cabin had no TV or radio.

Come Thanksgiving day, we ate at whatever place was open, be it KFC or pizza somebody.  Eventually, Safeway started selling pre-cooked fixings and we moved a little closer to Norman Rockwell.  Feral cats hauled our turkey carcass under the house while we watched, transfixed and thankful to be chilled to the bone.

The best years were the ones during which we narrowly missed being marooned on the cave side of a huge rock formation, or almost lost a limb or two or worse to tide-shifting driftwood from Asia.  Ted was supremely confident of his family's resilience and strength and never worried.  My mind was always crafting what I was going to say to the authorities when the investigation began.

My kids are grown now, with families of their own.  Without Ted, without kids to herd, without the thrill of dancing around salt water moving erratic driftwood, I have no more idea about how to deal with Thanksgiving than a porcupine does a Barbie doll.  I'm prickly all day and I don't want to be with others.  And yet, I feel a longing for my family and feel like a lost pilgrim.  This year, I wound up at a combination Thanksgiving and birthday party for a friend that had some family members present. 

Actually, the Thanksgiving meal and birthday party combo suited me just fine.  I was with people I am keen on, with kids making noise and breaking things.  Next year, however, I may go back to Lincoln City for the week.  I want to get in my car and make a long drive, with the wonderful emotion of homefulness creeping up on me and expanding along the way.   

Homefulness is that feeling we get when our plane lands on home soil, or we are finally arrived after a long time away.  The feeling of being in home's way is both the journey and the arriving.  To think of seeing one's people again, the embrace of someone we long for and love.  Someone who understands us, our idiosyncrasies and sensibilities.

The way I feel about my home in Edmonds and the way I feel about traveling to Lincoln City are the same.  I am channeling Mrs. Jorgenson.  Spiritually speaking, I have bones in both places.

There have been years since Ted's death when my family and I did orchestrate a rendezvous on the Oregon Coast for Thanksgiving.  Why do I ever try to do differently?  I do like to try new things.  I even like to resurrect old failings and try again.  Einstein called that insanity.

Perhaps there is a yearning that occasionally stirs wild in me to be more like the Norman Rockwell vision of family and home.  Where does such a notion spring from?

I blame the Election-Thanksgiving season. This season in particular held out the long, long table with abundant and beautifully turned food spread out before us.  Or perhaps it is just for some of us. 

Perhaps this is the Thanksgiving I discover I am not a pilgrim for Norman.
 

THE EXECUTIONER'S LOVE SONG TO RUBBER TREES

What is belonging?  If I lose it, can I ever get it back?

Belonging to a human is big.  It is crack.

In a memory, there is Rigdon Road Elementary in Columbus, Georgia.  In 1963, we are studying rubber.  There is the Goodyear Company and a picture of a rubber tree plant in South America.   Somebody foreign is tapping it.   

My father was the agronomist at Fort Benning, adjacent to Columbus. He purchased a great many plants and landscaping services as part of his job on base.  He purchased from Mr. Cargill, the owner of Cargill Nursery.  There I am, there my parents are -- we're looking up rubber in the  World Book Encyclopedia.  My father said he could get Mr. Cargill to give my class a rubber tree plant.  I instantly knew such an event would put me at the head of the belonging food chain in my class.  I wanted it to happen something fierce.

I belonged in a family.  I belonged in a class.  I was hoping to belong to the teacher, like a pet. 

“A sense of belonging,” writes Dr. Kenneth Pelletier of the Stanford Center for Research and Disease Prevention, “appears to be a basic human need – as basic as food and shelter.  In fact, social support may be one of the critical elements distinguishing those who remain healthy from those who become ill.”

This pronouncement rings true to me.  It has red plastic hearts floating above. 

The Goodyear Company and rubber = one and the same.  In second grade, all I knew about manufacturing was the local cotton factory that transformed tufts of billowy white cotton into towels and sheets for the world.  I imagined manufactured rubber as flat white sheets that flowed out of trees in South America like paper from the school's mimeograph machine.  I imagined rubber manufacturing smelled like the sulfated castor oil that wafted through my school on the day the lunch menus were printed.

My second grade self didn't know there was a rubber boom in early twentieth century that had a significant negative effect on the indigenous population across Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Columbia.  Labor shortages led to rubber barons rounding up indigenous people to tap rubber out of the trees -- just like in the picture.  Ninety percent of indigenous poplulations were wiped out.  The World Book Encyclopedia of the 1960's made no mention of this.

Un-belonging someone is serious business.  It's an ancient form of the death penalty.  It's called banishment. 

In modern times, when two teenagers robbed and beat a pizza delivery man with a baseball bat in the state of Washington, the Tlingit nation banished them to separate islands. In 1994, the Council of Chiefs of the Onondaga Nation in New York formally banished three members for gross violations of tribal laws. The men were formally stripped of their citizenship in the Onondaga Nation; were severed from their community and families; and had their rights, property, and protection under the ancient Iroquois Law of Onondaga territory extinguished. A tribal government near Fairbanks, Alaska, punishes offenders who are caught drinking alcohol with a $50 fine. Repeat offenders are subject to banishment from the village. 

Not all who are banished survive. 

I remember looking through the panes of glass that gave view to the school parking lot.  There strode my tall, strong and handsome father with his yellow Banlon shirt and khaki pants, toting a rubber tree plant in a five gallon tub.  I nearly vomited with excitement.  Mrs. McWhirter didn't know he was coming to my class with a bone fide rubber tree plant he got from Mr. Cargill's nursery.  But I did.  Sometimes knowing a secret tightens the hold of belonging.

Today I am voting, and it occurs to me that there are two views of belonging on the ballot.  On one side, we have the locking off of the borders around our belonging, and the banishment of many already here.  On the other side, we have the vague notion that all who are here and some who want to be here belong, and somehow we are going to figure out how to feed everyone and stay safe.  So where do you belong, the ballot asks.  Make your mark. 

I read in Psychology Today that some seek belonging through excluding others. That reflects the idea that there must be those who don't belong in order for there to be those who do.   Groucho Marx said that he wouldn't want to be in a club that would have him as a member.

My humanity craves belonging.  On the other hand, I couldn't wait to move out of second and into third grade.  As soon as I could, I voluntarily left Georgia.  I had little to do with my family of origin after I began raising my own family. When Ted died, I gave away most of my belongings and left my community.  I didn't feel I belonged anymore in the place where he and I had belonged together.  A few months ago, I bought a teardrop camper to escape from where I belong.  I am discovering that my present day belonging is either so small or so big that I tow it around with me, wherever I go. 

I banish myself.  I have executed belonging to find belonging.  I am in a club that is asking me to choose where I belong.  My childhood view of rubber trees is wider, sadder, sweeter, residing in Georgia, ensconced in my heart.  Rubber tires have carried me everywhere I have been thus far.  Rubber trees, belonging, banishment, voting.  A rubber tree can be a thing in a pot that exalts a child and casts her father in a temporary glow.    

I sing of love to rubber trees with both red plastic hearts and question marks, floating.

DON'T PEE ON AN ARMY OF FROGS WHILE CAMPING

A big gathering of frogs is called an army.  I had never seen an army of frogs before, let alone become involved on a personal level with such a gathering.  That happened to me three days ago, while I was camping.  It was memorable.

My mind strolls a lot while I'm camping.  I have little experiences that happen in big detail.  I feel alive.  I think I'm doing the best I can with my life, even though my heart is broken. Maybe I'll get some credit for that on the mystical day of reckoning.  When camping, I make decisions and have a project to tend to.  I like it.  Those reasons are enough to take me down new roads. 

This week, I camped in salty Grayland/Westport Washington, with no boundary between my state park spot and the Pacific Ocean.  Yesterday was just my second day, and I was faced with the question as to whether to bail on a four-day trip.  The alternative was to ride out a dangerous storm coming my way. 

The low pressure front approaching caused a mixed lot of fishing and sightseeing boats back to Westport marina earlier than usual.  I happened to be there, and I saw the resulting boat traffic.  It was an unexpected and stirring sight that made me think of things like peril and bravery.  I took photos of rusty boats for an artist friend, and thought about leaving V staying.  I watched the water rising, trembling. 

While towing to the coast, I had put off making a potty stop when I was about a half-hour from my destination.  By the time I parked my trailer in site 99, my bladder was in dictator mode.  I chose to go in the woods behind my spot, rather than try to unlock my trailer, or run to the camp bathroom.  For everyone over sixty, I know you're with me on not fumbling for keys or running when you have to really, really go.

How was I supposed to know the woods would be carpeted with an army of traveling frogs?  I noticed this a little too late to shoo them.  Maybe I peed on some, I thought.  I had no idea if I had murdered frog(s) in the woods.  I never was a natural at grasping chemistry.  I located a bowl inside my camper, filled it with water, and offered it to the frog world as a complimentary decontamination site.   Still, I wish I could erase the thought of innocent and unsuspecting frogs, a surprise attack.  Casualties of me. 

What causes an army of frogs to sojourn through one particular area versus another?  It must be a food source.  Or a water source.  I wonder if they were traveling because of the approaching storm, which I knew nothing about at the time of my inadvertent frog defilement.

Any going-in-the-woods experience is iffy at a state park no matter how forested it might be.  Hiding behind a tree only helps the goer on one or two fronts.  There is always the element of a surprise camper out for a hike.  And why do campers congregate in places called campgrounds?  Safety, mostly.  That thought made me feel even more guilty about the frogs.  What if my frogs were trying to get away from something dangerous only to.....

I ran over a large toad with a push mower fifty years ago.  This is still a vivid memory.  It wasn't dead, but it was bleeding.  I ran into the house and got my father's styptic pencil from his shaving kit and raced outside to try and stop the bleeding.  After doctoring the wounded, I returned to the house again.  I had to replace the pencil and straighten the kit, and I wanted to fetch a bandage.  When I came back to the toad, bandage in my hand, my large and bloody patient was gone.  Hopped off, I hoped then.  I still hope.  The guilt I felt at the time was like a new layer of hot skin.  As I mentioned earlier, it's a vivid memory.  

Because I was a child, I worried for a long time if my father would be able to detect essence of toad on his blood pencil, as I called the anti-hemorrhagic pencil back then.  So I had guilt and I had fear. 

I also regret something I did at Lindsey Creek when I was eleven or twelve.  From the creek, I would launch clay rockets into outer space.  I poked pockets in clay balls and inserted a little creek water and a tadpole into each of the pockets.  I wanted to see if tadpoles could live in space capsules, the way Russian monkeys were doing at the time.  I vaguely remember giving up my space program with enough data to demonstrate that, no, they cannot. 

I didn't want anyone to know I was conducting these experiments.  I knew what I was doing wasn't right, but I did it anyway.  I realized later in life that I was objectifying the tadpoles and robbing them of their future.  I can't remember how old I was when I awakened to feelings like regret, the responsibility of humans for innocent creatures, empathy, and shame.  A curious child unsupervised can be a danger to others. 

I saw a movie once called "Magnolia".  It was a critical success and the characters were memorable, especially the grief-wracked wife of a dying man and a fumbling police officer who misplaced his weapon.  At the end of the movie, not a lot was reconciled in the story line.  It ended with huge frogs falling from the heavens above onto car windshields, grass and pavement .  It was a gruesome raining of frogs.  I think the same thing happens in the King James Version of the Holy Bible.  This, and other parts of that popular book, are not comforting at all if you ask me. 

With the storm approaching Westport, seeing the boats and thinking of bravery made me want to ride out whatever was on its way.  A friend was also camping at this park, and she was leaving early.  I told her I was going to stay one more night.  Once I made that decision, I envisioned my dogs, Oliver and Miss Kitty, floundering in the 30 to 40 foot waves predicted for the next few nights.  I saw myself driving home in strong winds, my little teardrop camper swaying uncontrollably into a Volvo station wagon filled with pre-schoolers.   Frogs raining from heaven.  I decamped and towed myself, the dogs and my gear back to Edmonds that day, which was yesterday afternoon.  As it happens, wind gusts reached forty-miles an hour not too long after I left.

Today:  Thoughts of a raging storm that I reluctantly decided to miss.  Thoughts of biblical events that defied the laws of physics.  Thoughts of the chemistry of human urine and its effect on frogs of the northwest.  Of the efficacy of styptic pencil on bleeding amphibians.  Of tadpoles in space.  Of guilt and empathy.  Of risk avoidance related to the well-being of others. 

How many details of one's life will be raked over on that mystical day of reckoning? 

Will I get any credit at all for trying to make the best of things, and do no harm?

   

LIST CRAVINGS

NOTE:  There will be no mental heavy lifting of conceptualizing, categorizing, and analysis required to read my blog today.  

I attended a writing class with a prestigious and talented instructor.  (Mind:  This guy is going to straighten you out!)  I was eager. 
He was talking about the elastic boundaries between non-fiction prose, essay, poetry.  He used a term I had never heard before: 
A Collage Essay.
This named what I do.  All my senses and I were instantly exalted.  I needed to sit still, however, because the chairs were very close together and it was a full house. 
(Mind:  You are going to be this guy's favorite and most insightful student today!)

He referenced numerous well-regarded works that involved lists.  He gave the class five minutes to make a list of lists.  I came up with the best list of lists ever created:

Apology narratives
Explanations of why
What's wrong with tonight's moon
How clouds ought to behave for maximum enjoyment by children
Possible outcomes of my 60's
Possible DNA paternity events and how they might affect me personally
Ways in which the sun could be redesigned for world-wide benefit
Ways in which my life is already perfect

"Does anyone want to read what lists you came up with?"  said Prestigious Instructor.

As students read and the instructor commented, it became apparent to me that I was supposed to come up with universal lists already out there for me to just find and record, or draw conclusions about.  I was incorrect in making a list of personal lists.

The lists I was supposed to come up with were lists such as:  Liner notes from old record albums, Tools you will need to put together this shelf, Wedding Registry lists, Lists of war dead, Lists of medical names of sexually transmitted diseases. (FYI: Instructor made the comment that medical names are among the most beautiful words available to our ears.)

Instructor Approved List Example

Thank you right arm, for not thrusting yourself to the ceiling, thus volunteering me to read aloud my personal list, leading to gentle correction from Prestigious Instructor. 

Fine.  I can make my personal list work for me in some other context.  But first, I need to understand list, lists, making lists, reading lists. 

1.  Read New Yorker article, A List of Reasons Why Our Brains Love Lists.
New Yorker: a-list-of-reasons-why-our-brains-love-lists
From this I learned the brain craves effortless data.  I gleaned names, Claude Messner and Michaela Wanke, as well as Walter Kintsch.

2.  From the internet word search "Claude Messner and Michaela Wanke: 
Paradox of Choice: The more information and choices, the worse we feel.
Unconscious information processing reduces information overload and increases product satisfaction.
Genealogy affiliates.com  We would love to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.
Good Weather for Schwarz and Clore: This article is a tribute to the "mood as information" paradigm in general.   (This article thickly makes the obvious point that our mood determines how we process information.) 

3.  From the internet word search "Walter Kintsch" I determined he is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at University of Colorado.  http://psych.colorado.edu/~wkintsch/
He writes about things such as "Construction of Meaning" and "Metaphor Comprehension". 
Whoa.
 
4.  Internet:  "Lists": 
Witnesses to historical events
Wives who set their husbands on fire
Celebrities who went on to commit homicide
Things that would happen if prostitution were legalized
Known gangs
Kidnapped and missing persons

5.  From the crossword dictionary "A list of things to do":
agenda
donts
items
catalog
errata
saint
todo
affair
MDSE

I have no idea why the word "saint" appears on such a list.  I looked up "saint" and got no clue.  I think it was put there to make the reader do some mental heavy lifting.

I stumbled upon one page during my research that reported studies have shown shopping without a list but after having made a list increases retention of what to buy while shopping. 

Back to my original, personal list that was a one-off from what Prestigious Instructor was aiming for.

I put my list under my pillow last night and slept on it.  This morning, I could plainly see that my list was merely a list of how I feel most of the time:

Ways I feel guilt.
Times I want to know why.
Ways I want to reorder nature.
Ways I am a little anxious about my future.
Entreaties about Who am I really?
What is there to be grateful for?

Ah. 

The Widow Lessons.

Shindler's List

HOUSE

Shipping Container Apartments

The meaning of house was something I understood.  After that, I struggled with its meaning.  Today I feel an abundant understanding of the meaning of house that is intensely personal and gratifying.  It is true for me that my house is the center of my universe, and I can have it and put it and be in it anywhere on the planet.  Becoming a widow gave that to me.

This, from John Berger, poet, essayist, novelist and screenwriter:  In traditional societies, everything that made sense of the world was real; the surrounding chaos existed and was threatening because it was unreal.  The house one lived in was built in the very center of where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal line.  The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world.  The vertical represented both gods in the sky and the underworld, the dead.  One's house was the exact location of the real and the spiritual. 

Repurposed Silo

I believe in this picture, although intellectually I know that the chaos of the world is real.  I can live in my house, though, and decide what to let in.  I can safely stow my stuff in my house, I can guard against disease, I can set it up against injury.  I'm a tangle foot, so that last item is a vigil.

I grew up in mid century, and learned from my culture to believe in the materialization of the house. I decorated my house and carried on inside in a way that made it a home for me, Ted and the kids.  We all had a lot of fun, such as the time I found out beautiful cotton flat sheets can be used for wall coverings, costumes and all manner of art.  Ted and I also endeavored to pick our house right, pay the mortgage, to some day have a nest egg for us and our descendants. 

That typical, American, hearth and home vision and investment house and home went up in flames for me and Ted a couple of times.  Recessions, real estate busts, job loss, career choices chipped away at the materialization and monetary value of the home for us and millions of Americans, starting in the late eighties and nineties, continuing to present moment.  In our case, we lost gobs of money selling two of our houses, net zeroed on some and gained a little once.  From those experiences, I ceased to view my home as an investment.  As a result, I became purely emotionally attached to my house, my home, my center of the universe.  That worked better for me, and for Ted.  We were happy homebodies sans investment jitters.  We started using the entire color wheel on our walls, for our own delight.

Inspiring backstory: read Interstellar Orchard Blog

Becoming a widow unmoored me in various ways, including a re-evaluation of this emotional attachment to my house, my home.  After five years of living alone in a house that was both too big and too distant from my family, I finally let it all go.  Stuff, money, property, rural privacy and quiet, significant emotional attachment -- I let it all go.  Becoming a widow opened my mind to the possibility that I can decide what I need today, find it and acquire it, become attached to the fun of it -- and still keep my eye on other possibilities.  I live in a small house of 920 square feet in an urban neighborhood.  I rattle around there, too.  I own a tiny teardrop camper and travel with it.  Both are my houses, at the moment.

People today live in silos, churches, apartments, old grocery stores, tree houses, RVs, cottages, tiny houses, McMansions, shipping crates.  I am drawn to alternative housing.  I am drawn to neighborhoods, both gleaming and seedy.  My material investment cozy family home paradigm has shifted and now has more fluidity and changeability and I find more beauty there than ever before. 

Tiny house, Big social movement

It is solo I who is at the very center of where a vertical line crosses with a horizontal line.  The horizontal line represents the traffic of the world.  The vertical represents both gods in the sky and the underworld, the dead.  Whatever and wherever my house, it is the location of the real and the spiritual because I am there, not just the house.  Knowing myself comes first -- what I love, need, want, don't want.  Everything else -- including the chaos of the world -- may be real, but it's real out there, not here in my house.  I don't need to obsess about the future if I am satisfied with where my center is today.  If I need to move from my house, I know how to do that.  And it is alluring and liberating to know that I can live just as fully in a storage container or a tree house or a mansion (if I trip into the Lotto), or 920 square feet in Edmonds, Washington.  I still have an eye for beautiful flat all cotton sheets wherever I make my house.

I know first hand that the loss of home, of belongings, of real property is a devastating blow to a widow.  It can also be part of a new beginning and a freedom that can change and grow with us.  It doesn't happen overnight, but it can happen.

Understanding what house means to me is a gift that widowhood gave me.  And because I live at the center of the universe, I am connected to the spirit realm where my loved ones tell me to enjoy it, and pass it on.

Never more at home than in a teardrop