I may have figured out a solution for my malaise. We'll see how it goes.
In the meantime, the trick-or-treating continues all over J-land. Feel free to drop by (previous entry), whether you have a journal link to leave or not. I've added Kit-Kats to the mix!
I'm just trying to decide what I want to do ~
Public or private?
AOL or not?
Eclectic or focused?
Journal writing or other writing?
Four funerals in one month is a lot. At least at my age. Each one of them a reminder of how little we know about one another. Each one of them a reminder that we will, every one of us, be remembered in some way.
How do we spend our time? How do we spend ourselves?
I'm feeling introspective just when I don't want to be.
Yesterday: calling hours for the fourth of the recently departed. I didn't know him at all, although I'm sure we were introduced at parties on occasion. My connection is his sister-in-law, a classmate from boarding school (35th reunion upcoming, for those of us skinny enough to put in an appearance). I was there probably less than an hour, but here's who I encountered:
the family, of course, which includes my friend, whom I have known since we were girls struggling in an advanced English course with probably the best teacher either of us would ever encounter, and her husband and three daughters, including the gorgeous young woman I first visited in a NICU 18 years ago after she had had the temerity to arrive three months early, and her sister, who has just lost her husband, and her mother, a retired Presbyterian minister;
another mom from those Montessori days that weren't really so long ago;
a woman whom I worked with when she was a legal secretary and I was a lawyer;
and a set of parents, now brand-new acquaintances, who also have a displaced Tulane daughter.
The best thing about my life is the variety of people I encounter. In any given week, I am teaching in an Orthodox Jewish school, studying at a Jesuit Catholic university, and worshipping in a progressive Presbyterian church. The funerals have been for a brilliant lawyer-educator-world traveler-musician-writer, a solid and and steady veteran-engineer-Mason (yeah, that part was interesting), a generous musician and vocalist with a vast circle of influence among colleagues and students, a gifted artisan whose work shines across our city. All of them spouses and parents.
Life is so much and so full and so short. How can I live it better? How can I write about it and do it justice?
On the island beach near Northport Harbor on Prince Edward Island, crabs and gulls have come and gone.
Three weeks ago, a memorial service for an 84-year-old lawyer-actor-singer-educator-writer-war hero-friend, all par excellence.
Last week, a service for a good friend's father, another gentleman in his early eighties who also served in World War II with distinction and then came home to build a family and a career and a warm circle of friends.
This week, the service for my daughter's voice teacher, only 61 and a woman so full of life and music that she could not possibly have simply collapsed and died on Tuesday.
Next week, the service for a friend's brother-in-law, aged 54.
**********
One of yesterday's readings:
Going to Heaven!
I don’t know when—
Pray do not ask me how!
Indeed I’m too astonished
To think of answering you!
Going to Heaven!
How dim it sounds!
And yet it will be done
As sure as flocks go home at night
Unto the Shepherd’s arm!
Perhaps you’re going too!
Who knows?
If you should get there first
Save just a little space for me
Close to the two I lost—
The smallest “Robe” will fit me
And just a bit of “Crown”—
For you know we do not mind our dress
When we are going home—
I’m glad I don’t believe it
For it would stop my breath—
And I’d like to look a little more
At such a curious Earth!
I’m glad they did believe it
Whom I have never found
Since the might Autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.
~ ED (79)
She overcame a devastating experience in high school, holding her head high and exuding compassion and good humor.
She weathered several disappointments during her junior year at a school where the word "Achievement" is spelled in 100-point font.
She spent a year-and-a-half looking at colleges, preparing applications, and suffering the endless scrutiny that that process entails.
She went off to college 1000 miles away, got turned back by a hurricane, came home and replanned her life in 48 hours, and went off to college again, 2500 miles away that time.
The child whose "phone phobia," as she jokingly refers to it, means that a telephone call to one of her best friends is an agonizing transaction, put together courses and books, joined an intramural team, and applied and trained as a volunteer, all in a completely unknown environment.
She's keeping one eye on the future, making plans to return to the city she wants to call her own, and one eye on the present, making friends, playing soccer, and working at an animal shelter.
I have no idea how my DNA could possibly have made a contribution to such an independent, balanced, and self-assured young woman, but I would be happy to claim any responsibility at all.
I want to give Harriet Miers the benefit of the doubt. I really do. That tends to be my naturally ingrained approach to almost all people in almost all circumstances. One of those wishy-washy liberal things, I suppose.
But Give Me A Break. The Senate Judiciary Committe has returned her judicial questionnaire and asked for more information, stating that her responses were "inadequate," "insufficient," and "insulting."
Contrary to popular opinion as generated by prime time television, what lawyers mostly do is write. Voluminous amounts of writing. They do that after they have done their research (or gotten someone to do it for them). Voluminous amounts of research. It's understandable that television viewers may not be aware of this basic fact of lawyer life, because a television show depicting lawyers doing much of what lawyers actually do would be insufferably boring. However, the sad reality is that most lawyers are not sexy babes in short skirts arguing dramatic cases before curmudgeonly judges. Most lawyers are scrunched up behind a computer with stacks of papers and books sliding off all available surfaces as they try to make enough sense of conflicting arguments to create cogent ones of their own.
So how embarrassing is it that a lawyer would produce written work that is characterized as inadequate, insufficient and insulting? Let me count the ways.
No, on second thought, that would be one of those boring lawyer activities.
Ms. Miers, however, SHOULD be engaged in boring lawyer activities. She needs to convince the rest of us that, should she make it to the court, she will be capable of developing and writing an opinion.
Not lookin' good so far.
Who knows?
The fact that Harriet Miers indicated that she would support a ban on abortions in all cases except where a mother's life was in danger means. . .
NOTHING.
Some conservatives are finding a nugget of comfort in the revelation that years ago Ms. Miers responded to a pre-election questionnaire with a response indicating her opposition to abortion in almost all cases.
Some liberals are, as a result of the same revelation, cooking up questions designed to put an end to the entire Miers fiasco.
But, as Ms. Miers no doubt knows, she will have to put aside her personal views on abortion should she ever in fact find herself seated on that bench from which she will have an opportunity to rule on an abortion case.
Roe v. Wade could be with us for a long time. Lawyers are taught, from the first moment of law school, to value precedent -- to give incalculable weight to prior decisions of the court. The importance of legal precedent cannot be underestimated in our system of justice. Lawyers are paid to advise clients of the probable outcome of various courses of action -- advice which they render on the basis of precedent. Why do we teach our young people about Hammurabi's Code in high school? Because the establishment of precedent is followed by a certain degree of order (which, given that we are human, is always relative to one degree or another) -- and Hammurabi's utilization of that concept was a watershed event in human history.
Harriet Miers as Madame Justice Miers might find it well nigh impossible, despite the sincerity and unshakeability of her personal convictions, to do anything in the context of an abortion case other than to apply the Constitution as it has been interpreted thus far and, for instance, to determine that the parental notification rule in the case presently pending before the Court is outside the limits established by prior cases.
Of course, Hammurabli viewed precedent within the context of specificity -- as do our courts today. We insist that a court ruling be founded upon the specific facts of a specific case. There is plenty of leeway within Roe v. Wade itself for a complete upending of abortion law as we know it. If nothing else, that case is over 30 years old and depends to at least some extent on a trimester-by-trimester assessment of pregnancy which, given today's technology, is on fairly shaky ground. And each case that comes before the court raises a set of facts which, presumably, differs from those in decisions the court has already handed down.
Any justice, despite his or her personal views and committments, might find, given the right set of fact and argument, that she or he is compelled to vote to overturn Roe.
The most disturbing aspect of the whole Miers scenario is that the President of the United States, James Dobson of Focuis on the Family, and several other poorly informed individuals seem to think that the President is entitled to the support of his opinions from any of his nominees to the Court who eventually make it to the bench. One of Miers' supporters has said that if she is on the Court when the parental notification case comes up, she will not "disappoint the President."
In fact, she may well disappoint the President. Once she takes the oath of office as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, her allegiance is to the Constitution, not to either of the other branches of government nor their leaders.
That being the case, we should be asking how she views the Constitution and the role of a judge with respect to interpreting it. That she devoutly and sincerely practices and draws strength from a profound faith is laudable, and will no doubt affect her approach to her work. But it will not determine the keenness or depth of her skill set in legal processes and reasoning, nor the predilections and preferences that she as a lawyer will bring to the Court.
I called up a friend this afternoon and told her that it was so beautiful out that, whatever we were doing, we needed to put it aside and go to the beach.
Not that I was doing so much.
Plus, I had an important errand to run at the beach. Someone had asked me to collect some flat Lake Erie stones for her. I mean, really, what choice did I have? Such pressure.
Plus, my friend really needed a break after 10 days of focus on her father-in-law's death and funeral and various extended family matters. The only real option was a trip to a beach. I am SUCH an altruistic person.
When I dropped my friend off this evening, I mentioned that, while theoretically I was cleaning the kitchen, I hadn't bothered to wipe off the counters yet.
"I'm sure you can think of another field trip for this evening," she said helpfully.
The leaves haven't changed much yet -- our proximity to the lake delays fall by several days. But every so often there's a dramatic reminder of what's coming.
We are having such a good time in our adult education program at church this year. Today a local professor of religious studies spoke about the earliest church fathers; next week she is coming back to talk about Augustine, the one whose tracks we follow. Most Christians, of whatever ilk, have little awareness of just how extensive our reliance on Augustinian formulations is -- much of what we take as "gospel" truth first came from his pen in the 4th and 5th centuries.
"Early church fathers?" -- a term that referred first to bishops considered to be direct successors in the apolostic chain from Christ and his original followers but was expanded over the first few centuries CE to include all members of the clergy, it also refers to a select group of early writers. Most of them, interestingly, were in what today we would call the Eastern Church: Northern Africa and the Mideast. Many of the struggles over early church doctine had to do with the fact that these men were writing in Greek, a much less precise language than Latin. And since they were inheritors of the Greek as well as the Christian tradition, the footprints of Plato are sprinkled liberally over early Christian writings.
One of the early debates was whether God had in fact created Christ -- whether there was ever a time when Christ was not. The Nicene Creed, which many of us repeat in church on many Sundays during the year (and in which we proclaim that Jesus is "eternally begotten of the Father, begotten and not made"), is basically the fourth century formulation of the argument against those who set forth the position that there was a time when the Son was not. (The debate is known as the Arian Controversy, thanks to Arius, the chief proponent of the losing side.)
We also touched on the development of Trinitarian Christianity. Contrary to casual Protestant belief (and Protestants like to think that we rely on upon the Bible -- sola scriptura, in the words of Martin Luther -- rather than on the Roman Catholic amalgamation of scripture and tradition), there is no articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in the Bible. While all three persons of God appear in the Bible, the co-equal status and relationship among Creator, Son, and Spirit was worked out in the council debates of the third and fourth centuries.
In other words, we Protestants, regardless of what we might want to think, descend from the traditions of our ancestors in the fairth just as our Catholic brothers and sisters do.
Yesterday I clambered out along a treacherous breakwall to a lighthouse, hoping that I would not make an idiotic mistake that would result in a sprained ankle or a crushed skull, either of which would have rendered my 45-minute drive home impossible, which would not have been a good thing, since no one knew where I was.
Then I saw a mink scampering over the rocks.
I spent a lot of today on funeral-related activities.
If I am ever a minister doing a eulogy, I promise to wear an attractive and stylish jacket.
This is what Byron Calame in last Sunday's Times reported, in part, about the paper's readers:
<<Dan Wakin, a culture reporter, wrote that readers who pick up the paper "have an inherent curiosity as part of their basic intellectual makeup." For John Geddes, a managing editor, this means "They're curious about the world around them - the 'why' behind an event or a trend." Added Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor, "They're curious (and this is crucial, and not so common these days), interested in stuff that happens outside their own lives."
After putting the curiosity of Times readers at the top of his list of their notable attributes, Mr. Keller cited four others. "Second, I think of our readers as people who use the news. They are engaged. ... Third, I think of our typical reader as somewhat skeptical. ... Fourth, I think our readers are busy and jealous of their time. ... Fifth, I think of The Times reader as someone who loves the language.">>
I love getting love letters from the editors of The Times.
Here is another humorous part of the Calame column:
<<In producing the Thursday and Sunday Styles sections, Trip Gabriel, the editor, explained: "We write for people who might want to sample the latest in fashion, night life, fitness or a dating trend; but perhaps more importantly, we write for readers who crave knowing about these things with no intention of experiencing them. That's why our stories invariably include a degree of sociology.">>
I, for instance, might want to be a dazzlingly stylish minister.
That's why I'm sitting here in jeans, a purple waffle-texture t-shirt, tiny glass beads from Yellowstone, clogs and a gray high school hoodie.
But I have seen a wild mink this week-end, and that was VERY cool.
Also, I have decided to read all of Shakespeare's history plays and unearth my daughter's flute and learn to play it.
Did I believe I had a clear mind?
It was like the water of a river
flowing shallow over the ice. And now
that the rising water has broken
the ice, I see what I thought
was the light is part of the dark.Wendell Berry, Breaking
Some conversations with friends who have recently moved, yesterday's Round Robin "Village" topic, and occasional comments on blogs by women who pretty much stay at home and build their entire lives around their families, have had me thinking about how we build community. Those thoughts presuppose a wish to participate in a real-life community of people and buildings and spaces, which does not seem to be a universally shared desire. I can only speak from the experience of someone who values community intensely, and who wonders how I would go about building a context for myself if I were to move. So . . . just some meandering thoughts:
I think that I wanted friends as soon as I knew that friends existed. I grew up way out in the country, and my first companions were animals -- real and stuffed -- and my younger brothers, who weren't of much use from a conversational standpoint. What a delight school was! And although I had the same struggles with cliques and acceptance that every child faces, when I reached boarding school in seventh grade I began to learn to subsitute friendship for family and to live in close-knit communities, with all the good and bad that they entail. One of my aunts, who to this day lives on farmland far from the city to which my uncle commutes, asked me once how I could stand to live where I do. "All those years in dorms?" I wondered.
One of my friends, a politically active individual in our small city, an inner-ring suburb, says that it took her four years -- four years after moving here to begin to feel a part of things. (She said this is the context of a discussion some time ago in which several of us were contemplating what it would be like to move somewhere else.) She is an extremely outgoing, engaged, and opinionated person -- someone who has no trouble interjecting herself into a conversation or situation. And when she arrived here, she had six young children, which gave her multiple opportunities for involvement in all kinds of places. Yet it took her four years. I wonder whether I could manage it in that time frame as an empty-nester old fogie.
I remember a woman in a moms' group -- that would have been exactly 21 years ago! -- saying that when she first found herself at home with a small baby, she tried to "pick up" other moms, in the grocery and at the park. We all laughed with deep appreciation -- wasn't that exactly what we were doing in that group?
Throughout much of my life, I've been able to become part of a community because I've been in an environment where it exists -- a school or a workplace -- and there are usually a few people with whom I feel some kind of ineffable bond. One of my frustrations with my current workplace is that I am in a most definite minority, culturally and religiously, and the people with whom I feel the most affinity are 25 years younger than I -- so that while we share political and professional views and frustrations, we don't share a social life.
My group of closest friends comes from my former church -- clearly a result of almost incomprehensible serendipity. We all turned up at about the same time in a large church -- meaning, in that case, a church that encompassed all sorts of religious, political, and social leanings -- and we found each other through a neighborhood community program there, were all parents of young children, were mostly without extended families in town, and were all in search of a life of faith in a questioning and open-minded way. We were able to connect on so many different levels in so many different circumstances -- how lucky was that? As the religious right comes more and more to the forefront of American life, I realize that if I were to move to a new geographic area, I would have to do extensive research before I could walk into the door of a church and hope to feel at home -- but the first time, I was certainly no more than an accidental tourist.
And having switched churches, I do have some sort of a gauge for estimating when community begins to feel real. I attended my current church for nearly 10 years before making an official change of affiliation -- at first I really wanted to be left alone to worship in peace and do some internal work. But as I began to indicate an interest in becoming involved, it took no time at all for the phone to start ringing and, once I became an official member, I found plenty of places in which to build friendships.
In the end, I guess, it's a combination of personal openness and geographic fortune. I know a couple of women, one in my neighborhood and one at work, with whom I would probably be engaged in very close friendships, but for the aura of private space with which each of them surrounds herself. I recognize it, because sometimes I encircle myself with the same wall, and there's nothing to do but respect it and enjoy them to the extent that they do extend themselves. And I know that there are locales in which, were I to move there, I would be lucky to find even one true friend, places where I would be Hannah in The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
I have no conclusions. But I do wonder. I would like to move to the edge of the water somewhere -- but would I have friends?
Yes, I realize this doesn't look like a village. But it was a moment, sort of on the outskirts of what might be called a village, on the coast of Prince Edward Island. And if I lived in a village, I would want its border to look like this.
I don't think I want to live in a village. I love living in an inner-ring suburb that sparkles with diversity and people who like it that way. But then, my city is sort of like a village. If you live here long enough, and I've lived here almost 30 years, then the libraries groceries schools churches temples parks pools rec center restaurants theatres stores all teem with people you know, or people who know people you know.
If I did live in a village, though, a REAL village, it would need to have boats.
*****
Take a look at the other Round Robin entries:
Carly......Ellipsis
Karen...Musings from Mavarin
Sara...Photographic Memories
Mary...Alphawoman's Blog
Dorn...Through the Eyes of the Beholder
Betty...My Day My Interests
Kimberleigh...I Shaved my Legs For This?
Aunt Nub (Liz) Fool's Paradise
Maryanne...My feelings are real
Chris...It's all about me I think
Derek...Derek's Photo of the Day
Mary...Hunybea's Open Journal
Renee...Timeless Calligraphy Studio
Marie...Photographs & Memories
Robin...These are the days of our lives
Rose...WAIT-NOTYET-/
Cosette...Pandora's Bazaar
Robin...Midlife Matters
Steven...sometimes photoblog
October is my favorite month, despite all three of the worst events of my life having jammed themselves into those 31 days. (In three different years, thankfully.)
October's beauty is the prelude to November's bleakness, which is one reason I like it. Life in a nutshell, as Hildegarde said. There is nothing that exudes dreariness like a midwestern landscape in early November, and you know that it's coming when the tress blaze gold and red in October.
October is sharp and jagged, which is another reason I like it. None of the gentle ease of spring, when rain gives way to daffodils and daffodils welcome kinglets and, finally, the warblers tumble all over one another in their haste to make it to Canada. By October the birds are mostly gone, it pours one day and streams sunshine the next, and the trees do this THING that they do. Go figure. I brought home a maple leaf yesterday that I had picked from up from the slick sidewalk. It sheens an extraordinary scarlet that fades into a deep orange at the edges, but its veins are lime green. How can such a thing be?
October roads in the Berkshires shrink under wave upon wave of hued ancient mountains. October soccer balls sail across turquoise skies bordered by transient deciduous color. October darkness brings memories of a night when this world and the next seemed almost to touch.
Clytie was a water-nymph and in love with Apollo, who made her no return. So she pined away, sitting all day long upon the cold ground, with her unbound tresses streaming over her shoulders. Nine days she sat and tasted neither food nor drink, her own tears and the chilly dew her only food. She gazed on the sun when he rose, and as he passed through his daily course to his setting; she saw no other object, her face turned constantly on him. At last, they say, her limbs rooted in the ground, her face became a sunflower, which turns on its stem so as always to face the sun throughout its daily course; for it retains to that extent the feeling of the nymph from whom it sprang.
It is so dark and dreary and rainy here today -- need to recall evenings as they should be.
I could fill reams of paper with stories of a family under seige, a family marked forever by that relentless stalker, grief. I could write about growing up without a mother, under the twin shadows of loss and alcoholism.
But for today, I simply want to do the events of October 5, 1960 the honor of recording them.
It was a perfectly ordinary day. Everyone says that, according to Joan Didion in the recent Sunday Times article in which she explores the staggering grief she has experienced since the death of her husband. Everyone begins the narrative of sudden and unexpected death with the same preamble. "It was an ordinary day." Even Joan Didion begins with those words, despite the fact that she had spent the earlier part of the afternoon on which her husband suddenly died visiting her daughter, who was in the hospital in a coma.
It was for us, however, really an ordinary day, exactly 45 years ago. I was late to school and missed the bus. I almost always missed the bus, because my mother wanted me to eat breakfast and in second grade I was never hungry that early. As she did almost every morning, my father's mother waved to us from her dining room window as we drove down the hill past her house.
A little later, as she would tell me when I was grown, my mother's mother, who lived a mile away, in town, walked into our house, calling the name of her daughter. Dishes had been left on the table and a load of laundry was running in the basement.
"Carol! Carol?" she called. It was an ordinary morning and she was going to spend it with her daughter and grandsons. She had begun to clear the dishes when my father's mother walked in.
"Oh, Dorothy," she said, in a pained voice that barely emerged from her lips. The two grandmothers looked at each other and thought, This is not happening. This communication that is about to pass between us cannot be.
After she had waved to us, my father's mother, still in her nightgown and robe, had turned back to her kitchen from her dining room. Before she had taken more than a few steps, she heard a thunderous crash from the road below the hill. She grabbed the telephone and called for an ambulane, saying urgently, "I think my family has been in an accident." Then she took off down the hill, running at breakneck speed down the drive and a quarter of a mile down the road.
My mother was already gone. My baby brother died a few hours later, having been transported to Children's Hospital with massive brain injuries. I lay in the ditch, screaming for my mother.
My other brother, who was four and has no real memory of ever having had a mother, is the only one left who has any recollection of the moments before the accident. He says that our mother glanced into the back seat where we were located, and then there was darkness. Apparently we swerved just over the center line as an oncoming car crested the hill in front of us.
When my brother woke up in the hospital four days later, his skull fractured and his elbow shattered, I had been lying there conscious for 48 hours already, weighted down by my full leg cast and abdominal stitches. And other things. The adults wheeled my tiny brother out of the room to tell him what I already knew, and the hallway stiffened against a child's wails, just as it had two days earler.
And then we began, my brother and I, murmuring in our hospital beds as the leaves outside the window turned yellow and red, to build our lives anew. We were children, and so we were brave and did not know that we were small.
It must have been an evening just like this, warm and hazy, the sun lingering on the horizon.
Our two families lived on a hillside out in the country, separated by a small woods and a short gravel road, and my grandmother told me that she had come over to our house, for desert I think. I don't know if my grandfather was with her. At any rate, the adults talked for awhile in the kitchen.
"The baby's already down," my mother said. "Would you like to go in and take a peek?" "
Oh, no," said my grandmother. "I don't want to disturb him. I'll see you tomorrow."
If I had only known, she would say later. If I had only known. Meaning, If I had only known that I would never see either one of them again.
And then she would say that as she walked home she could hear my mother singing through the kitchen window as she did the dishes.
October 4, 1960
May You be a shield about us, protecting us from hate and war, from pestilence and sorrow. Curb within us the inclination to do evil, and shelter us beneath the shadow of Your wings. Guard our coming and our going and grant us life and peace from this time forth and forevermore.
~ from the Rosh Hashana Liturgy
We Presbyterians often refer to our uptight selves as the Frozen Chosen, but on occasion we do know how to melt a little.
Today is World Communion Sunday, shared by Protestant churches across the globe. Our fabulous music director put together a worship service in celebration of Africa, and our altar was covered with African print fabric and piled high with loaves of an Ethiopian bread. The music was Zulu, South African, Nigerian, Liberian, Ghanaian, and Cameroonian. I'm sure I've got some of the suffixes wrong, but you get the idea. We had an incredibly talented drummer and by the end of the service even some of the really frozen types (that would include yours truly) were rattling around some noisy instruments.
You can listen to Siyhambe here. (We were louder.)
Siyahamb' e-hu-kha-nyen' kwen-khos, Siyahamb' e-ku-kha-nyen' kwen-khos.
Siyahamba, hamba, siyahamba, oo-oo, siyahamb' e-khu-kha-nyen'kwen khos.
We are marching in the light of God, we are marching in the light of God.
We are marching, marching, we are marching, oo-oo, We are marching in the light of God.
What a perfect day for a new year's resolution, right? It's the first day of October -- the first real day of fall in my OCD book (that 22nd of the month thing never works for me). It's beautiful outside -- a clear, crisp, early autumn day -- and I've had a perfectly lovely walk. It's the first day of a five day week-end for me, and that's because it's also almost Rosh Hashana -- the first day of the New Year if you happen to be Jewish. I'm not, but whatever. A lot of firsts, and the children are gone. The perfect time to begin the full house overhaul.
So . . . I've been up in the library. I took a lot of stuff up there to sort in June and left it all over the floor. It's October now. (No, you guessed it, I'm not really OCD. More, uh. . . shall we say. . . "relaxed?") But we can't do the sunroom ceiling until we move the furniture out of the sunroom, and we can't move the furniture out of the sunroom until we have a place to put it. Time to clean up the library.
I get one side of it pretty much done, and decide to wash the hardwood floor before I tackle the other side. I start kind of squeezing the mop around the fireplace, and it gets covered in ash. I must have decided last spring that the fireplace could wait until fall, when it really had to be cleaned. Well, as I just said, it's fall, right? But I'm not in the mood to tackle the fireplace, not when I see that wet ashy water. So I just kind of mop it back under the fireplace screen.
The I try to push the bucket via the mop handle and knock it over. Now there is a complete bucketfull of ashy water all over the hardwood floor.
And God forbid a single floor in this 90-year-old house should be level, so it all dribbles toward our bedroom.
I slosh through the water just in time to turn up the area rug in the bedroom. Then I grab the roll of paper towels (I've even been cleaning WINDOWS) and start dumping them everywhere. The water is kind of deep for a paper towel cleanup, but since it's full of fireplace ash, I don't want to use even my crummiest towels.
My husband, who has been working on the yard all morning, comes out of the shower. His closet is surrounded by a moat.
"NOT A WORD!" I mutter. "NOT A SINGLE WORD."
To his credit, he utters not a word.
I'm done now. I'm thinking that it took me four months to do the east side of the library. That gives me until February for the other side. Except that we really do need to do the sunroom ceiling, because otherwise the heating bill this winter is gonna be, like, $1000 a month.
You know, I am a deeply spiritual and mystical person. I am SO NOT MARTHA.
