Gratitude in the Details
We spent last week at the lake, listening to loons call each night and slowly thinking about house projects for the summer. My parents came over from their home in Middlebury for a couple of days; Bee zipped off to work each day and came back for dinner and games of Bananagrams.
Jeremy took care of one “big bang for the buck” projects - moving the French doors so they opened flat against the inside walls. He’ll need to do the final details once we’re back up there, but the difference in space is incredible. It’s like we have a fully open space to the outdoors, instead of one that chops the space into smaller bits.
These used to open only to 90 degrees from the wall.
We also took one lovely evening kayak together, seeking the beaver dam and the loon nest. The sound of reeds against the kayak hull fills me with joy.
Saturday’s drive was mostly easy, other than the traffic around the GW bridge. Probably if we lived in NYC we’d have been exclaiming on how not busy it was. We’re not city people.
Seeing the “UNDER CONTRACT” adder to the “For Sale” sign on the lawn was a smile-inducing jolt. We left a week ago with a couple of showings scheduled for the day; we return to a different world. Time to get rocking!
Sunday morning, after our normal routine of coffee in bed accompanied with sailing videos (this week a Sailing Florence, a Ran Sailing, and a Sailing Tarka), the work commenced.
We emptied the attic.
Broom swept. I don’t think it’s EVER been this clean!
Jeremy started on the garage, focusing on piles for the dump and for the boat. Slowly the trailer filled up with trash; the front part of one bay accumulated items that are bound for Calypso and the storage unit we have in Deltaville.
I went through the attic detritus, adding to the trailer pile and starting another one of items destined for the OPO. There’s now a box called “Time Capsule 1” with photographs, Calypso logs from our first trip, and gems like the original proposal I wrote (in 1994) to get funding to help 6th graders “study geography by following a 28' sailboat on her journey around the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean. This study would be made feasible by a monthly contact by means of video, radio, phone, fax, and mail. Bt the end of the year, students will have gained an in-depth understanding of geography and how it concerns them, both as individuals and as members of society.” (Think I got funding?)
The details of 20 years of life (and the 30 years of life lived before we got here) are filled with memories. Grateful ones. Unexpected ones. Choosing which ones need to be commemorated with physical manifestations is not simple or without qualms. But the mere act of uncovering those sometimes long-forgotten details means that choosing to let go means also that we’re choosing to really let go. Those memories won’t surface again; any pain at the loss will also be gone, sooner than I might think.
Every day it’s one more cabinet, or space, or area. There’s excitement tinged with nostalgia.
How lucky are we to have it all.
