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.