Were you listening when I told you I was moving? If you didn’t quite get the enormity of that statement – if you can’t imagine the chaos and the boxes and the agony of the process – the stacks of stuff that don’t deserve to move to Colorado measured against the stacks of stuff that get to go – or if you have not done this recently, in this new century,  then I bet you are clueless. After moving out here to northern CA. in 2006 with my husband’s job transfer and settling right in, thinking I would be here for the duration, I proceeded to bloom where I was planted, as the saying goes. I really did bloom. I have loved being in California. But my husband died, other family members shifted from their Tahoe location to a more exotic locale and so now I am ready to return to Colorado. This time truly for the duration. I am so busy that it’s hard to justify taking the time to make a blog entry.

I am working my way through this 3 bedroom house, including an art studio filled to the gills with paint, brushes, collage papers and canvases, books and art teaching materials. I have a kitchen where a lot of cooking actually happened – these days you see gorgeous kitchens looking like no one ever even boils (a yummy pan of) water in them. There are dishes here for several different types of family meals, both casual and elegant. Linens – I love nice bed linens. Towels must be comfy and thick and plentiful. Art? Are you kidding me? Every wall was arranged with art. Sculpture done by my father and even me, including a tall skinny Massai type woman who I sculpted in college – she has lost her head several times in various moves (I have almost done the same) and I always glue it back on, because where I go, she goes. Masks and tribal finds from Africa and continuing unique gifts from my children’s trips, and those kids of mine don’t go just anywhere. Well actually they will go just about anywhere – one of them is on his second passport now and the other one has 40 countries under her belt. They bring me the weird and wonderful un-noticed items that only they would know I will love. An amazing hunk of stone from Yemen that resembles a petrified brain, if you can imagine that. Taken from the ground in a land of nothing but sand. A nice-sized chip from an ancient pot, gathered from an historic southwestern place where such pieces still casually litter the ground. Both from my son of course. A beautifully embroidered, little bit dirty sleeve of a tribal dress, sold at a market in the hill country of Viet Nam. Just the sleeve, because you see they throw nothing way. So I have this sleeve, which I cherish, from my daughter who knew I would put it out somewhere and honor the intricate beauty of it and that I would also leave it lovingly dirty with authentic Vietnamese soil. Just a few of my treasures collected over a full lifetime. It all has to fit into a truck. Driven by someone I do not know from a hole in the wall. Will he be sober? Does he drive too fast? How’s his vision? Can I please just meet him and look him in the eye before he takes off across Utah and Wyoming with all my things? He has to go over Donner Pass into Reno, then those Utah salt flats, then through that desolate part of Wyoming…

The other night I dreamed that my moving truck went off a cliff. All was lost. My globe-traveling son would hold me in higher esteem if I had fewer possessions – he admires those who live quite simply. He doesn’t own a TV. Even my daughter has  streamlined her environment since she and her husband have begun to live abroad; it is a scary crazy thing to move an entire household of your goods in containers stacked up like chicken crates on the outside deck of a rusty old ship headed across an ocean. Still I have my own humble concerns about the journey  my things will take. I would hate to experience the simple life as a result of my truck going off a cliff. But I am sure I would survive and maybe be the better for it. Although maybe not. I would try to be better for it but…it would be hard to live without my special rock and my tribal sleeve.