Our House’s Last Hurrah.

I don’t have pictures of this event, as I felt it would be a little invasive to use the people involved as part of a public post, but this is a picture of our house. Let me tell you what went on here yesterday, because it was a very fitting final occasion. With a closing date looming just three weeks away, I don’t think we’ll be hosting any more parties here. (We hope to have our first party at the new place on Memorial Day.)

So . . . I’ll try to keep the background story as short as possible, but it’s quite remarkable and deserves some space.

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This Sho’ Is a Happy Day!

Oscar winner Hattie McDanielHope you recognize the quotation in the title as being from Gone With the Wind. Mammy says it when Scarlet has her baby, although I can’t remember if it was baby #1 (Wade) or #2 (Bonnie). Bonnie’s the one who ends up being killed in a horse-riding accident. (Spoiler alert, and not that Bonnie has a thing to do with the subject of this post. Also, Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in the film, was looked upon by some as giving in to the racism of the novel by agreeing to play that part. And then she won the first Oscar ever by a black actor and couldn’t sit with the rest of the cast at the awards ceremony! Well, all that is a subject for another day.)

Anyway, why is this a happy day for us? Because our house is under contract. As I talked about in an earlier post, moving involves lots of drudgery, even this one.(We’re only moving across town, and we’re getting rid of a lot of furniture by

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How Happy Have We Been in this House?

Tomato ripening on the vineWell, yesterday the “for sale” sign went up on our front lawn. We are selling our lovely, lovely house (note that I don’t use the word “home”). I can still remember the day that we pulled up in the driveway and opened the front door. My heart just about stopped as I saw the soaring living room. (The heart issue might also have come from the fact that we’d set off the burglar alarm.) Then I remember the months-long stretch when the bank couldn’t seem to make up its mind to go ahead and sell us the house.

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Thoughts on Thankfulness

Here I sit the table cluttered with dishes, cups, leftover food, and utensilsday after Thanksgiving, at a kitchen table that still has dirty dishes on it, facing counters still piled with debris. Jim and I will launch a commando raid and get everything cleaned up later on. It would have been nice to get up to a clean kitchen this morning, but our guests stayed and stayed. Isn’t that great? The surest sign of a successful party is that people don’t want to leave. So I’m reminding myself as I sit here of the wonderful time we had last night sitting around this very table (and the one in the dining room, too, which is also still cluttered). How fast special events go by! Which is only another way of saying, how fast life goes by! Everyone left and I looked at Smoggy, our cantankerous cat and said, “Smoggy, Thanksgiving is all over for another year!”

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My Adventures in Mindfulness

Kingfisher looking alert

Here’s what I wrote in the afterword section  to my book (see sidebar for ordering info!) titled “What I Learned From My Summer Vacation”:

1. Pay Attention

I’ve mentioned earlier how my mind tends to scamper ahead of what’s actually happening so that I don’t fully experience what’s going on at the moment.

Loving the Mozart Requiem isn’t the same as singing it!

Choir singingMy favorite movie of all time is Amadeus, the 1984 film adaptation of the play by Peter Shaffer. (Not the R-rated “Director’s Cut” version, please, but the PG-rated original release.) It’s not historically accurate in many ways, but so what? It is permeated with the glorious, glorious music of Mozart. And I have to believe that Tom Hulce’s portrayal of the this incredibly gifted but often troubled genius is very close to what the real man was like. So many great scenes.

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Hold Things Lightly . . . But Do Hold Them!

Over the past few months as Jim has continued his job search, there have been two strong possibilities that would have involved a very long commute.  One job was in Longmont, 60 miles each way, and the other in Westminster, about 45 miles each way.  Both jobs were temporary contracts with the possibility of permanent hires.  So there was no way that we’d move for such a short term, but we’d never continue the situation of living such a distance from Jim’s job.  We’ve always taken into account the length of the commute when we’ve bought houses–admittedly only two so far, but still!  So when we first moved to the Washington DC area we said that Jim’s commute was not going to be his second job.  We knew that we could get a much bigger and somewhat cheaper house by buying something “outside the Beltway,” but we just didn’t want that.  So we bought a small ranch house that in theory was 15 minutes from Jim’s job at the Old Executive Office Building, right next door to the White House.  He did end up leaving that project and taking something just over the border into Maryland, so if we had bought something way outside of town in Virginia we would have had to move.

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An Affecting but Erudite Memoir

What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love In a Dark Wood (Hardback) - CommonIn a Dark Wood:  What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love by Joseph Luzzi, HarperCollins, 2015.

Joseph Luzzi had just started teaching his mid-morning class at Bard College in November 2007 when he saw a security guard standing at his door.  “Are you Professor Luzzi?  Please come with me.”  As Luzzi reached the outside of the building, he heard the words that would forever change his world:  “Joe, your wife’s had a terrible accident.”  

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Happiness in Transient Things

I love tulips!  And if you’re going to grow them you’d better love them, because they give you maybe two weeks (if you’re very lucky) of bloom and then six weeks of dying foliage.  If you want them to come back the next year you have to let the leaves stay in place and die back naturally, as that’s how the bulb stores food.  You could just whack off the leaves as soon as the flowers are done and then plant new bulbs every fall, but doing that is 1) expensive and 2) lots of work.

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