I’LL BE 85 THIS SUNDAY 2024/07/08
For some reason, this feels like a big event. I have, for the last couple of months or so, been telling people I’m already 85. Maybe it could also be that living this long is both unexpected and inexplicable. For many years I was surprised that I lived past 21!
On Monday July 14, 2024, I will officially hit the 85 mark.
In the meantime, this last week, I was getting rid of stuff, which is, I think, appropriate, given my age, and given that death is on the horizon, I remembered my Grandmother saying to me, the last time I went to England in ‘78, that many mornings she would wake up being surprised she was still there, still alive.
When my grandfather died in January of 1959, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, was released from what, in retrospect, had to have been a difficult relationship for her—she expanded her abilities, made money on the stock exchange, played more golf, played more bridge. But I know that living got more difficult for her when Uncle Edward died. He’d always been there, this slightly tubby, genial person who I, as a young child, accepted without question. He wasn’t a biological uncle, or a married-into-the-family uncle, but he’d always been around, even when my grandfather was alive.
And now back to becoming 85 and some consequences thereof.
Clearing out is a consequence, similar to the kind of clearing out when moving, but this will be a different kind of move, one permanent, a forever move. I am getting ready for it by clearing out as much as makes sense to me, one of my mantras being not to leave a mess behind. And the problem then becomes, who would want what I have?
Stuff is going, bit by bit as I see it and let it go. I am enjoying the slow clearing, the clarity of some of the spaces around me, the thought that someone else can use, or like, or need what I have.
On Saturday, for instance, Keridwyn, my granddaughter, came over to pick up an air conditioner for her bedroom and she took the magnolia wreath from a Restoration Hardware sale that I’d bought in the mid 90s. Two things gone! My daughter-in-law is taking my red wheelbarrow, the one Fiona gave me several years ago. I love it, but am not doing that type of gardening any more.
On Thursday, July 4, I took the two rolls of heavy-duty webbing, one purple, one black, that I’d been using as bag handles and gave them away to another artist. She was delighted to score it, and sat hugging them for a few moments with this childlike grin on her face. I’d got the webbing because, several years I’d found these rag rugs made of sari silk with gorgeous, rich, vibrant colors at Depth of Field 1 on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis. I decided to make bags out of them, and during that last week when the store was closing, I bought the only two rugs left, made them into bags, and was left with most of the webbing—an item that would be difficult to find a new home for.
And this, now this is really silly! For some reason I was re-arranging the stuff I keep in one part of the pantry, vases, food containers, a couple of mixing bowls, the spare replacement unit for the water filter, jars to keep things in, a mug that Jim Grant gave me when I married Sid, and I happened on some #4 Melitta coffee filters, and, given that my coffee maker has its own built-in filter, and that these have been on the shelf for five or more years, these were a definite YES. And this week, after putting them on the giveaway space in my office, a patient took them away. I am so pleased!
Clearing out takes time, thought, persistence, invention, consideration, mulling, pondering, looking at what there is and asking “Am I ready to see that go yet?” And then concluding, Yes. No. Maybe. Not yet, but, sometime. The blue bowl that Zoe made that has pride-of-place on the mantelpiece in my treatment, just below the picture of horses galloping through the water on the Camargue—a no. My christening cup, now almost one hundred years old, close, but not quite yet. The cast-iron house and church on the mantelpiece, one with my name cast onto the roof. A no. The print Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest by Henri Rouseau 2 hanging just to the left of my desk, the one I’d bought one time at an art fundraiser for Saint George’s Greek Orthodox Church, that my friend, James, was fascinated with because he had never seen it before, a no.
And so it goes on.
1 Depth of Field, on Cedar Avenue, closed in the fall of 2019. https://flippistarchives.blogspot.com/2018/09/depth-of-field.html.
2 Women Walking in an Exotic Forest by Henri Rousseau owned by the Barnes Foundation. https://barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/collection.