Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
The Work of Shedding
The shedding is epic.
Most in need of shedding is my office, the room next to my bedroom. This is where I ran my consulting practice, balanced the books, helped my kids with their homework, mediated disputes, and wrote this blog. Everything I’ve done that had a written word involved happened in my office. Words overflow from the filing cabinets, litter the floor, and flutter in today’s slight summer wind.
The day was spent filling vanilla-scented kitchen garbage bags with the stuff that was my professional life for the past twenty-five years. Into the bags went overhead slides from grantwriting and evaluation workshops I did in the nineties, contracts and invoices, the sums on some of them making me nostalgic for my business’ heyday, and rivers of strategic plans, so many you’d think the whole town knows what to do for the next ten years. Make no little plans! I learned in graduate school. It’s a quote from famous city planner Daniel Burnham. The full quote is this:
Make no little plans,
they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.
I took his words to heart then and still do. I have big plans, yes, my old shedding self has big plans.
The start of my new plan is emptying out my beloved office, repainting it orange, and creating a new writing space.
I saved really good pieces of work, like the plan for a community park that had a huge fat file of little kids’ drawings and this study of alternatives to detention for delinquent girls.
And the Mother’s Day and birthday cards from my kids, even the ones that they signed just with their initials, NS, JZ, like they wanted to leave only the slightest possible evidence of our relationship. I get that. I always got that. They were adopted, they were sometimes equivocal. It’s okay. It didn’t hurt my feelings.
I also found the login info for the Ancestry.com DNA test that my daughter gave me several years ago. So I finally looked up the results and the news is I couldn’t be any whiter. Here are the stats: Great Britain 45%, Scandinavia 24%, Ireland/Scotland/Wales 14%, and Western Europe 8%. No exotic little percentages, just straight up super-white. God save the Queen.
Ambivalence is a risk in an endeavor like this. The temporary yearning for the clutter and intensity that was. It takes discipline to fill yet another bag and cart it into the other room to wait for sorting later. Will I keep the little statue that says “Best Mother in the World?” Thank you notes? Gosh, I love a good thank you note. I’m not ready to decide. So bag and carry. My color printer, my Dad’s ancient typewriter, a dozen half-started journals, 10,000 paper clips.
The clock.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
Best to you on this. I am currently going through much the same process and I find with each bag I donate to the universe my world becomes a little lighter.