pegkerr | Entries tagged with things in boxes

This has been one of those weeks where it has been a bit difficult to pin down exactly what the week has been about. What has been top of mind? I didn't have anything particularly extraordinary happen. (For St. Patrick's day, I made mashed potatoes laced with corned beef and cheese. Whatever).

I realized that I have been fighting a slight strain of melancholy and I put it down to the fact that I have been pushing forward with the decluttering/Swedish Death Cleaning. I am continuing to go through Rob's stuff (OMG, after ~~eight~~ seven years, aren't I done YET? But no, I am STILL pulling legal files out of the garage).

Going through Rob's stuff will never stop being painful. I am confronted by memories with every box I open, every piece of paper I reread. God, oh how I wish he had not stuck me with this burden. It feels like being trapped in the past. My sense of time gets hosed up when I am doing these tasks. I am about to turn 65. I am on the brink of retirement, and could conceivably figure that I am 2/3 through this life or more. Yet each box lands me firmly back in the past. And that is both intoxicating and so very painful.

Going through his things, thinking about the house, continually rubs my nose in the fact that this house used to be for a family. I lived with other people I loved. I ate meals together with them. I celebrated holidays with them. But now I live alone and it feels so wrong. When I get together with my siblings (whom I dearly love), I enjoy spending time with them, don't get me wrong. But they are all married, and I feel that difference in our situations so keenly. They are all with the partners with whom they have spent years, with whom they had children. And the ghost of Rob beside me is like a phantom limb, aching with pain.

Yes, I am keeping company with Eric, and yes, I love him and we are committed to each other. But there are very good reasons why we are not living together, why we will probably never have the deep history together that my siblings have with their spouses--someone with whom they have lived with for decades, someone with whom they have had children. The history I had with Rob.

I don't want to spend the rest of my life with my neck cranked over my shoulder, looking back longingly at the past. I feel so acutely the empty parts of my life here in the present.

I want to look forward toward the future. And yet I recognize that my future is an increasingly smaller and smaller portion of my life. Yes, I do know that there are things I can still anticipate with pleasure. I am, after all, welcoming my first grandchild this June.

But when I am going through Rob's boxes, the collision of past, present, and future is uncomfortable and painful.

God, being a widow just sucks.

Image description: A view of a range of mountains. Lower center: a bright spot at the confluence where one slopes down as the other slopes up. The downslope is labeled 'Past,' the slope behind the bright spot is 'Present' and the upslope leading away is 'Future.' An arrow points to the bright spot with the text 'You are here.'

Past, Present, and Future

11 Past Present Future

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Current Mood: sad

I took this past week off work. Over the past couple of years, I have rather dreaded taking vacations, because I haven't done much to make them fun. Instead, I've been going through boxes of Rob's stuff, which has always been a difficult/boring/dirty/painfully emotional task.

But over the past three-plus years, I've tackled most of the low-hanging fruit. I've emptied a lot of boxes, and I'm getting down to the last, toughest things to make decisions about.

It occurred to me that really, the things I have to decide about are down to just a few boxes worth. I always had a keepsake box for each girl when they were growing up. Why not put these last few precious things into one box for Rob? Or perhaps two or three at most?

So I bought three plastic bins, and I have been filling one today. I put in the newspaper printed on the day he was born and the newspaper with his obituary. His high school, college, and law school diplomas. Three of his most beautiful/meaningful neckties. A couple of shirts and sweaters I couldn't bear to throw out. His Minicon badges. Various other random items and documents (poems and essays from elementary school. The letter he wrote to Isaac Asimov, trying to convince him to come to Minicon. The badges he earned as a Boy Scout. A few of his business cards and his CompUSA and Best Buy name tags).

And I will move the plastic bin down to the basement (now dry, due to the newly installed drain tile) so I won't have to look at these things every day.

But for the most part, I have not been dealing with boxes this week. Instead, I've been enjoying a staycation. I have walked around the lake, and I've done yoga. I've eaten too many pastries and gone out to eat and ordered wine with dinner. I went shopping in Excelsior (the background for this card is from a photo of a rack of cards in a gift shop there). I bought a couple of sansevieria plants to put in my living room. I went to see Dune at the Riverview Theater. I listened to jazz (the "Friday Coffee" picture is from a live jazz station on YouTube). I lit all the candles in my living room, curled up on the couch, and read fanfiction.

I relaxed and enjoyed myself.

Oh. That's what vacation is for. Well, aside from going somewhere, which is difficult to do without worry during a pandemic. I think I spent the week as well as I could.

Staycation

43 Staycation

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This past week I took another week of vacation to go through boxes. This is, what the eighth week of vacation I've taken for this purpose in a little over three years?

Which absolutely sucks.

I am still angry that Rob left such a mess for me to deal with. But I AM dealing with it. Slowly. It is exhausting, laborious, and emotionally, it is absolutely harrowing. Hardly a nice restful week away. I always cry a lot during "box weeks."

In one respect I got lucky: coincidentally, my next-door neighbor had rented a dumpster for a kitchen remodel, and he kindly let me know I could throw anything I wanted into there. I was able to get rid of a lot of more stuff than I expected thanks to that permission.

This card pictures various items that I found this week going through boxes in the basement and garage: a journal he kept for three weeks when he was 11. A marksman certificate that he earned from the National Rifle Association (!) when he was a scout. A fly fisherman tying kit. A bottle of gun oil. A crisp dollar bill--possibly from a first paycheck? Etc.

I rented a U-Haul truck and dropped off crates of computer equipment for donation. I took some stuff to Fiona, and more to hazardous waste: fluorescent bulbs, window air conditioners (those were HEAVY) and a lawn mower.

One of the items on the card is a slip of paper that I found on the basement steps--it must have fallen out of one of the boxes I was carrying upstairs to the dumpster. Opening it was a shock and, again, it made me cry.

It was a copy of our wedding vows, with our names noted in Rob's handwriting.

Boxes

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*Deep breath*

Okay.

This is maybe the most complicated-in-thought card I've ever done (the card is at the end of this rather long post). I will try to explain it, and doubtless, some will be TL;DR and/or I may miss the mark in explaining it (if so, sorry!), but, well, it is important to me. And it's been the result of/prompted by the sort of deep reflective inner work that I hoped this project would spark, so I'm pretty pleased with it. Both aesthetically and what it's opened deep within myself.

The card started with my tuning into one of the prayer gatherings being held at 8:00 a.m. every morning while the Chauvin trial is going on, hosted by the organization Healing Our City (some of the organizers have ties to the Minneapolis Area Synod for the ELCA, my employer, and several of my coworkers are tuning in every day).

The day's reflection leader, Rev. Frenchye Magee of Hennepin Avenue United Methodist, invited the listeners to reflect on an image, a plant growing in a fractal pattern, which is common in nature, as we considered the thought, "What we practice of the small becomes the practice of the large." Large changes, she explained, begin with the smallest changes we make in ourselves as we engage in the work of social changes and justice, and those changes spiral out, becoming an opportunity to repeat the pattern in ever-enlarging arcs of love and hope and healing that transform the world.

As I thought over the next few days about this meditation, I made the connection with what I am doing in my own life. Last week's card, Books, was about the small, laborious changes I am making in my own life to open up space for something new. This past week, I shipped off my wedding china to a company that deals with used china as part of this downsizing/changing process (see the teacup in the upper right).

"Wait a minute!" you cry in outrage. "Stop right there! How dare you turn a meditation about the changes necessary to bring about social justice into a rumination about downsizing and decluttering. How self-centered and self-absorbed can a white woman be!" Well, yes, but please give me a moment to explain. I promise I will tie it all together.

I have been studying the concept of hygge for the past couple of years, and as I have been dealing with All of Rob's Stuff, I have become aware of the Swedish term döstädning, or as it's called in English, Swedish Death Cleaning. As I have struggled to go through all of Rob's stuff, I have sworn to myself, time and time again, I WILL NOT DO THIS TO MY GIRLS. I am aware that I have to make the hard choices, the small changes--but it's not only about simplifying my life to be kind to others after my death. I need to be aware of the changes I need to make in my mentality--caring more about people than things--not just in preparation for my own death, which hopefully, will be a long ways off yet. But also it's necessary to open up space for the life I truly wish to live.

There is nothing like becoming a widow to make you think about preparing for death. I saw how Rob became less and less tethered to his possessions as he lay dying in the hospital. He didn't care to read or open his laptop, and he didn't show as much interest as expected in the gifts we brought him, certainly far less than usual.

What ties it all together was something prompted by a song included as a part of worship in another Healing Our City gathering later in the week: People Get Ready:

People get ready
There's a train a comin'
You don't need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear the diesel's hummin'
You don't need no ticket
You just thank the lord
(See the ghostly train at the top of the card.) The song, as well as all the thinking I have been doing about making small changes in my life, made me remember J.R.R. Tolkien's great story "Leaf By Niggle." (You can listen to a lovely recording of the story being read here. Which is coincidentally where I got the script spelling out "Leaf by Niggle" in a font based on Tolkien's own lettering, that you see overlaying the ghostly train. Niggle's perfect leaf, dappled by dew, is underneath.)

Niggle was preoccupied by his own concerns, his hope of painting a perfect tree, leaf by glorious leaf. He is annoyed by the constant demands put upon him by his neighbors, especially the intrusive Parish. The constant interruptions cause him to neglect his work; in turn, his inability to finish his work caused him to be insufficiently concerned about his neighbors. Finally, he was called away from his work because he had to go on a long journey on a train, clearly a metaphor for death ("There's a train a comin' / You don't need no baggage / You just get on board"). It is not until he undergoes a series of small changes (in a realm that reflects Tolkien's Roman Catholic conception of Purgatory) that his heart opens up to his neighbor Parish, and in return, he discovers his Great Tree, a real living tree, as he pictured in his imagination but could not quite capture.

Luke 12: 13-21 tells the story of the rich fool, who cared only for building barns and piling up his wealth, until God required his soul to come to death, and what good did his riches do him then? A related parable is the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31: a rich man thinks only of his possessions and his own pleasures, ignoring the downtrodden Lazarus outside his gate until both come to death, and what good did his riches do him, in comparison to what he should have done for Lazarus? (“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again [in Dickens' A Christmas Carol]: “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”)

What should we do for Lazarus? What should we do for Parish? What should we have done for George Floyd, who had his life cut short by death? What small changes do I need to make in my life to open myself up to them? I hasten to explain that I'm not trying to say that de-emphasizing possessions is the work here; it's part of it, but mostly I'm pointing that process out as a metaphor for the work. I hope I can escape self-absorption, and make the changes to turn my attention away from mere things to the people around me: my neighbors Lazarus, and Parish, and George Floyd. And I have to make the small changes to root unhappy patterns out my life, including, yes, the inner racism I am training myself to see, the small selfishnesses, like putting away and getting rid of the old familiar things in my life that are no longer appropriate to the life I wish to lead. And in doing so, I think I can open myself up more fully to truly seeing and helping my neighbor.

It is difficult. It will take many small changes. But death is one of the few certainties in life. It puts so much into perspective, and things become so much clearer.

(So...did I manage to tie it all together? And did you actually read through all the way to the end???)

Changes

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One of the most difficult issues I've had to deal with in culling things down after Rob's death is What On Earth Do I Do With The Books?

Soooooo many books.

Like, thousands upon thousands of them. Rob LOVED to collect books and to get them autographed. I have already cleared at least a thousand books out of the house, and I still have nine floor-to-ceiling bookcases in the living room and dining room absolutely crammed with books. I have thinned out the stacks that were piled up on the floor because there wasn't enough bookcase room. There were still yet more boxes in the basement and garage.

Rob's attitude was that once a book came into the house, it could never leave again. PARTICULARLY if he had it autographed. And he had hundreds of autographed books--perhaps thousands. He loved going to conventions and meeting the authors and chatting them up, and he was so proud to get their books autographed. It was like a dopamine hit for him. And he especially loved to tell the authors he met, "My wife is an author, too; you should read her books!"

I mean, I got it, to a large extent. We met in a writing class, for heaven's sake, and yes, we bonded over books. I LOVE reading books. I went on to write novels, and I got a master's degree in English.

But still: sooooooo many books.

They were piled everywhere. In the corners of the living room and dining room and bedroom, with yet more boxes stuffed with books stacked against the wall. He would go to author signings at Dreamhaven and Uncle Hugo's and Once Upon a Crime. When I'd mildly protest about the money spent, he'd say "But honey! I got a first edition, AND I got it autographed! It's gonna be valuable someday!" He'd check out the remainder shelves at Barnes & Noble, and he'd go to the Friends of the Library Booksale and buy yet more books. "If you go at the end of the day they'll give you a whole grocery bag for just a dollar! And look--this one's a first edition! How could I pass it by?"

I actually started to worry about the structural integrity of the house due to the weight of all the books and bookcases. I couldn't get at stuff in the basement, I couldn't access my possessions in the living spaces, because of all the books in the way. Yes, I love books, honey. I adore them, yes, I do. But So. Many. Books. Including many I would never read.

I read aloud to him while he was getting chemotherapy, as he was dying.

And then he was gone.

It is hard. SO hard. It almost feels like I hear a scream of betrayal from Rob in the back of my mind whenever I try to get rid of a book. That's one of the reasons I created the memorial Little Free Library--it was one way to honor him and yet get rid of books.

But I couldn't possibly move enough books out of his collection through the library. It would take years. Decades. Centuries.

Eric and I have been thinking about the future. I am not sure what I'll do about the house, but he's made it clear he doesn't want to move in here, and I certainly understand that. Living in the house feels like living in a museum to the happiness of a family's life--but that family is now gone. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say it's a family that has changed and moved on.

I have been trying to cull and downsize my possessions, and so I've been trying to figure out what to do with all the books.

The girls won't take many. Fiona has decided to limit the number of bookcases she will put into her new house (undoubtedly taking notes from her parents' example), and Delia doesn't have space to put any. Uncle Hugo's is gone, and Dreamhaven certainly isn't going to take more than a few--Greg Ketter, Dreamhaven's owner, has told me that the generation that collected books is dying and/or downsizing their collections, and the secondary markets that catered to buying and selling used books for them are contracting and disappearing, too. Booktrader is gone, and Cheapo will only look at fifty books at a time and offers barely anything. The pandemic has reduced options even more: Hennepin County Library and the Minnesota Women's Book Project have stopped taking donations.

But I've found out that the Ramsey County Library is still taking books in three locations. Fine; Rob certainly was a supporter of the Friends of the Library projects; heaven knows he BOUGHT enough books from them. The only drawback is you're limited in dropping off no more than two boxes or bags at a time.

So I've been doing that. In the last week, I've made the forty-minute round trip three times, dropping off two boxes each time, each time grimly trying to turn a deaf ear to the protests of the agitated, ghostly Rob in my mind. I told my Friday coffee group that it would be easier if I were the sort of person who just read a book once and then never cracked the cover again. I have re-read some of these books, my mind traitorously whispers; shouldn't I keep them?

But no. For the ones I might want to re-read someday, sure, that's a risk, but if I haven't opened them in a decade, better to lighten the load and my life. I can always borrow them from the library or put them on my digital reader if I want to read them again. And there are some I've never read at all and I think I never will. A well-loved book is a map to the mind's thoughts at a moment in time. But I can still take those thoughts with me into the future, and release the book for someone else to read and enjoy.

Rob, I'm so sorry. I know you treasured these books. I have, too, but that doesn't mean that I have to keep them forever. I will always love you, but you are gone now, and I'm trying to create a new life for myself and space for a new future--with fewer things.

Books

Books

Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.

Here's a tip: if there is anything in your life that you don't want your spouse to know about, don't leave it in a box for her to empty out after you're dead.

Edited to add: to clarify: not infidelity and nothing illegal.

Current Mood: crushed

I am starting a push to go through the dozens of boxes (perhaps more than a hundred) that are filled with the stuff that Rob left behind that consist of--everything.

Rob hated to throw things away. The girls and I resorted at times to actually sneaking garbage out of the house when he wasn't looking. When he got stressed, he would simply pile everything in a box, willy nilly, and shove it into a corner. When I would get after him about trying to get rid of things, he would resort to filling boxes and hiding them--in the garage, in the deepest recesses of the closets, in the basement.

He never dealt with his legal files, never had a file retention/discard policy. He simply kept EVERYTHING, and he practiced law for 17 years. When he stopped practicing law, he kept everything in a storage unit, paying shameful amounts of money to keep it, and when he lost his job, I finally put my foot down and said we weren't paying for storage anymore. Then he moved the law practice stuff into the garage--and stored his car on the street. It has all been left for me to deal with.

I open up those boxes and it's unbelievable what I am finding. His bank statements from when he was in college (and he died at age 62). Telephone messages, scraps of paper with notes, the daily daycare reports from when the girls were babies.

I can't bring myself to simply toss it all, because when I go through the boxes, I do find treasures. I found his copy of the fortune cookie message he used to propose to me. I've put it in a little frame and it sits now in my office (mine is pasted in my journal). I found letters from his father, and oh, any number of interesting and touching things.

But there are boxes I open up and say, "Why, why, why? Why did you stuff a filing cabinet with magazines from 1982? Why did you keep the mimeographed instructions from your college about how to register for classes? Why the run of phone books from the 1990s? Why the bowling league score sheets from 1978?"

I have seen more and more clearly that I don't want to do this to Fiona and Delia when I die. It is a huge imposition to the people you love left behind if you don't bother to deal with culling your stuff. It is grossly unfair that I have to deal with disposing of Rob's legal files.

It is also emotionally gutting. I've cried over things I have found in those boxes.

But it is enormously satisfying that I am slowly, slowly making progress.

I took the week off work this week, and with the assistance of faithful family and friends, I removed what I estimate to be 3 TONS of stuff (mostly Rob's stuff) from my house and garage. The truckload weighed in 4040 lbs at the South Transfer Station, and aside from that, I also took a bunch of file cabinets to the scrap yard, gave other furniture away, and threw out so much recycling that I filled my bin, a neighbor's bin and others hauled yet more away to their own bins. The pile in my garage and basement is considerably less, and today, my new furniture was delivered. It looks gorgeous.

It was a difficult week emotionally. I went through drawers and file cabinets and continually was gobsmacked at what I found (really, you're using your file cabinet to store issues of Bench & Bar magazine from 1994? TV Guides from 1989? REALLY?) When we dropped off the file cabinets at the scrapyard, I started crying when we shoved out the file cabinet that had stood in Rob's office/TV room for decades and I watched the steel claw on the crane tear it into bits. I also wept when we shoved the law books out onto a pile of garbage at the transfer station dump.

But today, I had my reward: new furniture was delivered, and it looks just gorgeous. (That wing chair, by the way, is a stealth recliner). Thanks to the family and friends who worked so hard to help me this week. Thanks for the food, the advice, the cleaning, the willingness to take furniture and other stuff, the transportation, the room in your cars and recycling bins, the sweat, the laughter, and the encouragement.

Current Mood: accomplished

I loved my husband, heaven knows, but he was a hoarder.

By the time he was eighteen, Rob had moved eighteen times. My theory is that this trained him to understand that his home wasn't a place, it was his things. They were what was permanent. Therefore, he had to keep them permanently.

And he did.

When Rob was going to the University of Minnesota law school, he worked at the law library. One day, he discovered that the law library was discarding a ton of huge, heavy law books. Rob volunteered to take them, and the library said sure, they're yours. For free.

When Rob set up his law office, he proudly shelved them in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that covered all the walls of his entire office. To him, they looked cool. They meant that he had made it. He was an attorney.

When he had to shut his office down, he decided to put them into storage. Remember, he is not allowed to get rid of anything. I am ashamed to tell you how many thousands of dollars he paid for storage--he had that storage unit for over a decade. The waste of money aggravated me so much--how much of that money could have gone for our daughters' college tuition instead? Finally, when he lost his job and the walls were closing in, I insisted that he couldn't rent storage anymore.

So the law books and all the contents of his law office came to live in our garage. Rob parked his car out on the street instead of keeping it in a garage as any sane Minnesotan would. And he had to clear the snow off of it and move it from one side of the street to another during snow emergencies. He did this uncomplainingly for year after year.

For years I nagged him to deal with all debris from the law practice. But he never did. There was another TV show to watch, another thing to do with the girls. He told me the books were valuable. "Fine," I said. "We can use the money. Let's sell them." But he could never figure out who might take them. He talked about advertising on Craigslist (do people shop for law libraries on Craigslist?) but never did. It was obviously crazy to advertise online for a national buyer: the books were so big and so heavy that the shipping costs would kill us. Once, when we were holding a garage sale, he put a sign on the towering pile of boxes of books: "Law Library Wall O'Books. $3,000.00."

As if anyone shopping at a garage sale might think, "Wow, a whole law library! I just happen to have $3,000.00 in my pocket, and I should snap that right up. What a bargain!

Then he got sick.

As he became weaker, he fretted about his possessions. And seeing how it was stressing him out, I made a difficult promise: I wouldn't throw anything of his away without his permission.

Now he is gone. I haven't started dealing with the law office files (an attorney I know has promised to help with that, but his help has been delayed because his own father has died and he's still dealing with that estate).

But I have started dealing with the law books.

I tried. I called the Minnesota Women's Prison Book Project, asking if they could use them as a donation. Perhaps women who are working on their appeals might consult them? No. Too big. Too heavy. No space to put them. And (this is obvious to anyone who has worked in the law the last quarter century, and it's why the law library was throwing them away in the first place) attorneys use Westlaw and Lexis now. They don't look up statutes in moldering law books.

I called a friend of mine who works at Thomson Reuters, the successor to Westlaw, the original publisher to ask what value the books might have. "None," was his blunt answer. "Recycle them."

So I have been going out to the garage every couple of weeks and emptying one box at a time, ripping off the rotting leather covers and throwing the stripped books into the dumpster. It's painful. It's galling (I'm an author. I write books. Destroying them is an appalling thing to have to do.) And I can hear Rob screaming in the back of my mind, "Noooooooo! You can't do this to those books." (Which really means, "You can't do this to me!")

But Rob is gone.

The leatherbound books are large and crumbling. The oldest ones are from the end of the 19th century.

They are stamped inside a stamp for the U of MN library, and also with a name: "William W. Pye."

I did some online research and discovered he was an attorney and bank president who lived from 1870-1965 in Northfield, Minnesota.

William W. Pye (1870-1965)

(And now I'm feeling guilty again like I should have offered them to the Northfield library. They have a room there named after him). Presumably, after he died, they were donated to the U of MN law library. I wonder if his wife wanted them out of her house, too.

I threw away three boxes this morning, which was all I could bear to do at once.

I thought of Rob. I thought of William W. Pye. I went into the house and washed the skins flakes of cows that died 120 years ago off my hands. I managed not to cry.

This is so damned hard.

Current Mood: sad

Me, to Fiona : “So, IF I started thinking about dating again, what sort of guy do you think—“
Fiona (adamantly): “No.”
Me: “No, really, I just wondered—“
Fiona: “No. I’m not going there.”
Me: “Fiona, this is purely theoretical. You’re a mathematician, right? You can deal with the theoretical. Think of it like, um, pairing numbers.”
Fiona: “I happen to dislike even numbers.”

At which point, I cracked up and abandoned the conversation. No dating advice will be forthcoming from my daughter. (And it’s really true. She likes odd numbers better than even numbers. She likes prime numbers best of all, bless her nerdy heart.)

In other news, I donated 460 books to the Friends of the Library yesterday. They were mystery hardbacks, a genre I hardly ever read (except for a few selected authors). Many of them Rob BOUGHT at the Friends of the Library book sales over the years (he would go at the end of the day and bring home grocery bags full of books that he'd gotten for $1 each--uncaring of my shrill complaints: "Where are we going to PUT them all?") I hope to consolidate three of the remaining bookcases into the open shelves, which would allow me to remove bookcases that are sitting in the archway between my living room and my dining room. Then I can go shopping for new furniture.

Rob loved his books so, so much, and I did, too, but the number that he collected was excessive. It is incredibly painful to get rid of some. And hopeful. I sent the Snapchat below to the girls, and Delia called me up to console me and tell me that she was proud of me. And I am, and yet...ugh. I slept badly last night.

bookcase

Current Mood: indescribable

Today was one of those cry-my-makeup-off days that show up for no good reason. I woke up this morning haunted by images of Rob dying and kept breaking down into tears. I took the afternoon off.

I didn’t understand until I looked at the calendar.

This is the last day of the sixth month. Tomorrow starts the second half of the year since Rob died.

I went home and hauled some of the ridiculous technology that Rob insisted on keeping out of the basement. I dropped several printers and DVD players and monitors off for recycling. Instead of going to work out at the Y as I’d originally planned, I had dinner at the Good Earth, and I’m waiting for the wine buzz to subside a bit before driving home.

Six months. I cannot believe it.

Current Mood: sad

Peg Kerr's Journal

The Holy Tree Grows Within the Heart

2025 52 Card Project: Week 11: Past, Present, and Future

52 Card Project 2021: Week 43: Staycation

52 Card Project 2021: Week 25: Boxes

52 Card Project 2021: Week 12: Changes

52 Card Project 2021: Week 11: Books

Going through boxes again

Going through boxes

Stay at home vacation = lots of work and new furniture

Throwing away the law books

Continuing to transition

Six months

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June 2025

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