This morning I feel so full up of things to say that it’s hard for me to focus on one, but I’ll try. What with the looming crisis with North Korea, the Charlottesville tragedy, and my own media intake via audiobook and film, there’s just a lot of ground to cover. All, really, have to do with how we humans get along with each other–or don’t. Those pesky relationships!
I’ll start with the audiobook, because it focuses on the “Jerusalem” of human experience: those who are closest to us. (If you’re not familiar with the reference, it comes from the book of Acts in the Christian New Testament, in which the disciples are told to be witnesses of the Gospel “in Jerusalem, and in Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth.” So it’s a set of concentric circles, starting with where they are and moving out. I’ve heard many a sermon emphasizing that we need to build relationships and witness with our nearest and dearest first. If we haven’t done that, we have no business saying that we’re going out to the “uttermost parts.”)
First let me say that my purpose in chronicling the sometimes-rocky path we’re traversing in our efforts to renovate the downstairs isn’t necessarily to be entertaining, as I’m well aware that perhaps not everyone is as fascinated as we are with this whole process. Most of this saga falls into the “lessons learned” category, although, as our favorite author on home remodeling/renovation, David Owen, says, in any home improvement project you learn what you need to know as you go along, so that by the time you’re finished you know what you’re doing—but by then it’s too late. The project is done. If you’re a professional, then of course every mistake you make helps you not to make that same one on the next job. But for those of us who are simply trying to do a one-time item, it can get a little discouraging to realize that we’ll probably never use our hard-won knowledge again.
. . . is one less day you have left.
I wrote yesterday about passing the milestone of my last BSF class for the year and that I now need to be sure I have a new goal to fill the time left empty by the completion of that stretch. A memory from grad school came to mind as I re-read the post. A fellow speech grad student had her masters speech recital, straining every nerve, as one does, to get the performance ready and then, well, perform it. She did a good job (although for the life of me I can’t remember what her material was) and then she had a real struggle with depression once it was over.
We had been driven out of our house this past Saturday for showings, so one stop was at the library. Honestly, I don’t patronize the library much any more, the physical one at least. I get audiobooks and e-books, and I listen to podcasts and read political articles online. So my former at-least-once-a-week library habit has dwindled away to almost nothing. But we needed a place to hang out, so there we went. One of my favorite places at this branch is the nonfiction new book shelves at the top of the stairs. I couldn’t tell you how many great discoveries I’ve made there. Saturday was no exception; I picked this book off the shelf and sat down in one of the chairs upstairs, thinking that I’d read a chapter or two, and I was hooked. I ended up reading all but two chapters, which for me nowadays is kind of a record, and I made sure to read the conclusion.
Well, 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.
Two events coming up for me, one very long-range and one occurring next week:
I wrote last weekend about my “small, cushy adventure” at the Bible Study Fellowship area-wide conference at the Denver Convention Center. A great time of learning and blessing, And my position of being a group leader has also been a source of those same things. How did this all come about? From two very small choices. First of all, I wanted to join a daytime Bible study that fit in with my son’s then-schedule of taking the light rail to the Auraria campus for his classes. I did some online searches and found that there was a location just three miles from home with times that made it very doable for me to give him a ride. 
I keep thinking about the evening of Dec. 31st, the day our out-of-town company left. My husband and I had planned to go on our usual outing to the Denver Botanic Gardens “Blossoms of Light” exhibition. We’ve done this now for several years running, and as we pace down the pathways lined with beautiful lights strung imaginatively over the plants we try to talk about what we want to accomplish in the upcoming year. I wrote about this outing last year, for example, when we left it until the very last minute on the very last day, having to drive around for awhile searching for a place to park.
This morning I was driving across town listening to the radio and heard an interview with a Boulder man who survived Auschwitz. He was quite a character. No trace of self-pity at all. Flashes of very dry humor. Matter-of-fact accounting of incredibly horrible events, such as seeing his father beaten to death with a shovel for insulting a guard. Walter Plywaski was nine when Nazi soldiers came into his father’s pharmacy in Poland and told the Jewish family they had half an hour to leave.