Autumn Leaves and So Did I: On the Shock of Change and Rereading Some Books Like Medicine
Where Is My Mind?
I can’t find my pants. The art of losing isn’t hard to master, but you can’t master life without your pants. Am wearing a cotton kimono.
We just moved house. If I had one bag of clothes, I’d know where my clothes are, but I have bags and bags and cases of clothes, and they are all mixed in with the rest of the boxes and bags and cases, so I have no idea where my clothes are. Also I am one big ache from a long day of moving house deep into the night and again in the morning. Also we left an apartment of seventeen years, where we raised our children. Where we raised ourselves. Where I put out all my painted rocks.
The fan is blowing on me and I am cooling off like a cup of tea.
The apartment itself is solid and not too small, glory!, but there are some hilarious location problems. One of the charms of the place is that the houses are semidetached duplexes, with a driveway in between, so everyone gets windows on three sides. Sunlight! Sky!
And yet:
These driveways stretch to the back of the houses so that cars can park back there, and leave, at any time. So being on the ground floor means seeing cars come and go, especially as the landlord has rented two spaces and is loudly making room for a third. There’s a big gate that the parking people have to unlock and open manually. It’s right next to the living room.
The folks in the house attached to ours keep chickens. Bok bok bok crow chickens. They mostly make noise for half an hour, at dawn, close to two out of three bedrooms. They are behind a fence, so basically invisible.
The house isn’t right up against the sidewalk, there’s a fenced and gated front garden area that recesses it a bit (6 feet?), but still, the people walking by might as well be walking through the living room. They’re super close. You hear a lot of conversation.
I feel at sea, but not ocean. I’m not a speck on the wide ocean, just a little at sea. To slightly shift that metaphor, I’m still grateful for having found and been approved for this apartment, and to be finally done moving out, relieved as a shipwrecked person who has washed up on a spot of land.
One thing that tethers me to this world is listening to books— serious and otherwise. If you’ve written a book available on audio, I may have listened to it. Let’s posit that I loved it!
Despite my wide ranging nonfiction and fiction appetite, I also listen to most books twice, and some books over and over. I listened to David Sedaris into the ground. Two authors I go back to again and again are Nora Ephron and Carry Fisher. I love a great deal of what each wrote but will single out a late book by each—I Remember Nothing, by Ephron, and Shockaholic by Fisher.
There is something impossibly dear that gets transferred in those books.
It’s not that they are memoirs or essays, I suppose it’s the combination, and that they are ultimately bearing the lightness of comedy. Comedy isn’t always hopeful, of course, you can get a laugh in cynical sadness, but with these two something about their good company lightens my world.
And I need some light, because I can’t find so much as my pants.
***
Well, friends, I hope to go back to my regular round of topics this Sunday but while I was moving house it was hard to talk about anything else—though I suppose this and my last post on culling books could be part of my Writer’s Life topic. I’ve also written some political posts that don’t fit in the regular line up. Sometimes you just have to say what you apparently came to say. It’s autumn, autumn is always a time of change. It’s all going to be alright. Stay positive with me, stay positive, stay with me and I shall return to encourage us again. Bok bok bok crow
love,
Jennifer
Wonderful!