The Garage

I've spent much of the last week or two in the garage, digging out from underneath all the clutter.  Of course, it was much easier to stay inside when it was pouring down rain, as it did for so many days in a row. 

It is a commonality for people to say they have too much stuff--and the new catch phrase is "right sizing." Our family is no exception. I unearthed belongings still packed after three or four moves.  In the end, we had gathered a strange collection of things, a German coin from when my father visited Munich in 1932, mining plans for a gold mine in California that never came to anything, photographs of my grandmother with the King and Queen of Belgium, framed in silver. 

That's just the beginning--but now I can let go of a lot that I could not part with before.  Starting my new life has made me realize that I do not need to clutch on to these possessions any  longer.  I need to make room for new stages of life, leaving space for future memories, and a place for a house which will be filled with comings and goings.  So too in my writing; I can get rid of the clutter so that I can see what is really there.

I cherish a line from JM Coetzee, "Don't quit before the miracle."

Weeding

Predictably, summers grow weeds.  The rain nourishes them.  I spent much of the weekend in the garden pruning, pulling, yanking the sprouts I guessed did not belong.  Since I don't really know what I am doing, I am sure that I sacrificed some real plants for some false ones, mistaking bursts of green for thorns, what is ugly for what is beautiful.  I gardened long into the night until it was too dark to see the clover spuds amidst the hibiscus and hydrangeas. 

These days feel filled with weeds, real and metaphorical, taking things from here to there and back again.  Having moved two kids to college within five days of one another, I have transported my share of belongings.  There is a steep learning curve, twins intensify everything.  Shallow brightly colored bins are the answer, at least for the beginning.

I remember a friend telling me that the only two significant Septembers are the one when your child begins kindergarten and then when that same teenager enters college. Today I saw a mom helping her daughter pick out a backpack for her first day of school.  I was empty-handed, searching for a few things my daughter had forgotten to pack.  Always efficient, she was a little too spare in her choices.

Just before she left, she recommended a book, "Tolstoy and the Purple Chair."A line from that memoir resonated with me today: "Good things have happened before and will happen again.  Moments of beauty and light and happiness live forever."

My nest is not empty.

Bird Nests

When we moved into our house in June, there were two nests in the eaves. Even though the contractor and the architect said to get rid of them, I haven't had the heart yet. Somehow they seemed a symbol of building, of landing, of making a new life. 

We are finally almost settled, just in time for kids to leave for college.  I have been nesting all summer: unpacking boxes, moving things from here to there, finding space I didn't know I had.  It has felt like a homecoming unlike any other I have experienced.  The same has been true in my writing--for the first time in my creative life, I have my own desk where I can make a mess and leave it for morning and no one minds.

The novelist J. Courtney Sullivan said recently that, "When you write fiction you're like a bird making a nest." So too with being a mother, with feathering a nest.

The Piece You Don't Know

In her book, The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver writes, "The most important part of the story is the piece you don't know."

For me, this year has been a series of jigsaw puzzles to be solved.  While I have put some of the bigger ones together, several smaller ones are still missing pieces.  I don't know whether or not I will be able to find them.  Like the last edge piece which sticks out from a puzzle, these absences can be more glaring than the pieces that have been fit together.  I have been thinking a lot about how many pieces I may not ever be able to locate.  At first, this idea was terrifying to me.  In August now, with the weight of the summer passing, I am beginning to see these missing pieces as moments of possibility.  It is what we do with what we do not know that matters.

Mistakes

Just finished reading a fantastic book, "Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me," by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.  It's the kind of work that makes you think about hard things, in a good way. 

What stayed with me was how slavishly we work, as humans, to convince ourselves that what we want to see is indeed what we see. 

Cognitive dissonance is one of the most difficult distortions for us to let go of.  As Tavris and Aronson show through a series of convincing studies, we go to great lengths to bend our perceptions in accordance to our desires and our decisions.

I have been writing about the damage that this kind of thinking can do to the soul over time.

I love this line from their book: "The mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self justification; but the soul wants to confess."

They also mention how few of us are willing to stand up and say "I made a big mistake."  That makes those who do all the more worth of admiration.  As the authors explain, "And if you can admit a mistake when it is the size of an acorn, it is easier to repair that when it has become the size of a tree, with deep, wide-ranging roots." 

I want to plant new trees in my garden, ones that will grow long and good roots.

Watering

This summer is a dry one--I've been spending early mornings and late evenings watering,  thinking about water, and its growing scarcity. 

Last evening, I stood in my garden pouring water from a spout, a miracle in this late July. 

The air is heavy, uneasy and a child cries plaintively at the end of a long day; birds twitter and rush among the flush of late afternoon, the time when summer day melts into night.

I recall a churchyard in England where the flies buzzed, where I first attended a service called evensong.  I remember the minister preaching about time present and time past, let the evening come, he said.

The words seem strangely comforting to me during this summer of upheaval when my mother's lungs have filled with water and been drained, leaving her weak and tired.

She tells me she has spent the day washing old porcelains, as she wonders aloud where her spoons and forks should go--my children wash out paint brushes to make our new house a home--

I close my eyes in thanksgiving, whispering to myself, let the evening come.

An Untold Story

Anniversaries are powerful things.  Whether we wish to celebrate, observe, or ignore, we are deeply attuned to the lure of significant dates in all our lives.  Sometimes these dots on the calendar are very public events; on other occasions, they are more private matters.  No matter the circumstances, the human urge to document, to record, and in some senses to calibrate the rhythm of our internal seasons never ceases.  I am often surprised by what will trigger a memory for me--a slash of light on the mountains, a humid afternoon, a late evening phone call from another city.

What I am sensing in my writing life this summer is the peace that words can bring, the order that different combinations of the alphabet can provide to what would otherwise be an incomprehensible experience.

Recently, I came upon this line from Zora Neale Hurston: "There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you." I am beginning to understand what I think she means.