A lot of action here at the house this week. The contractor has come and given us an estimate -- 6000 clams to get everything done. The landscaper ditto -- 10,000 clams. That's a lot of clams before we even get to the part where new paint and wallpaper are installed by someone who actually knows what they're doing (i.e., not me). I prefer to think of the cost in clams rather than in dollars because that makes it seem more palatable.

It also makes me much more reconciled to the idea of selling the house and never again seeing the ineffable quality of light in the boys' old room. At 16,000+ clams, those are some pretty f-able sunbeams.

We are at the stage now of donating furniture -- a big chair, a big table, a little refrigerator, other things that seemed like a good idea at the time. This is a happy part of the moving process if only because someone other than us (strong young whippersnappers from the ARC, presumably) will be the ones to lift it all up.

I was really elated yesterday to find that the rolling cart which had disappeared from the storage facility for the past month has now returned. It was the best news of my entire week. This says something profound about my life this week.

What it says is: "For someone supposedly so passionate about Marxist theory, I sure own a lot of shit."

I am flipping out.

The economy, the housing market, the practicalities, the investment income ... numbers and realities. It all makes sense in every way that counts. We should sell this house.

Not just rent it. We are going to sell this house. I am shattered. And, yet, it is entirely my decision.

When I was in college, I dated this boy for a while. His name was Vladimir and his family had emigrated from the Soviet Union -- when there was still a Soviet Union -- when he was a teenager. Jews could sometimes leave then if they said they were going to Israel and his family had said that. But in Rome they changed planes -- not for Israel, but for the US.

And so Vladimir, sad-eyed and lonely, spent his teenage years in Brooklyn, lost and brilliant and beautiful.

He was admitted to Harvard early and I met him there by accident -- two hurt people who shared our lostness for a while and then didn't. When I think of him now, it is always winter -- always January -- and the rooms are always empty and the light is always pale blue.

And he told me one day that all he wanted -- all he wanted -- was to be in a room -- just for one day -- and to know that Leningrad was outside its walls. To feel that he was in the place that was home. What wouldn't he give, he said, for one day of that aching, fleeting feeling -- "home"?

When Tris was a new baby, we slept -- the three of us, Aiden, Tris and me -- in one bed in this house. My babies and me. The two babies have grown up and moved away, but the light is still there in the room that was once our room. It is the room where Aiden was sleeping when I took one last look at him before I headed out to the hospital to give birth to Tris. It is the room where we packed their things to send them off into the world on their own. It is the room still filled with the discarded relics of them that mean nothing to my fine young men and everything to me.

There is no way that I can hold onto the light in there, in that room. There is no way to stop time and live forever in a moment long gone when they -- my loved, my ached for -- were still my babies. That is gone now. And I will never see this light again when we are gone from here. And it breaks my heart.

But there is no way to capture that light. To capture it is to kill it. I was lucky to have had it at all.

What are you supposed to feel when the future is a shining adventure dream and the past is the marrow of your bones?

Yesterday was it -- the last day ever of my teaching career. The last reading assignment was two chapters from Magali Sarfatti Larson's Behind the Postmodern Façade and the very last line of reading that we discussed was Robert Venturi's quote about valuing the "the difficult unity of inclusion over the easy unity of exclusion" and how inclusion may indeed be more difficult, but it is also so much more beautiful.

The class is a group of really lovely students and they had made a card for me and we took a picture together and several of them spoke to me afterwards in really heartfelt ways and I, naturally, cried hard.

But now that part of my life is over. This morning, I am sitting home drinking coffee while they are beginning their final exam. I have grading still to do, of course, and the last scraps of bureaucracy. But the thing that has been one of the centers of my life for three decades -- talking with undergraduates about ideas and issues -- is over with now. I have no idea what my new reality will be.

It will certainly involve power tools, though. The contractor came in the afternoon to look at the hole in the basement wall created when Jonathan fell through the window-well two years ago. His comments on seeing it can be summarized mostly as, "Oh, my god." He is sending an estimate for the work today or tomorrow. The work itself probably won't be completed until June.

Jonathan and I shared a split of The Widow last night (in commemoration of the teaching, not the contractor) and ate some treats from our favorite bakery. And today, as I sit surrounded by boxes and empty walls, I am acutely conscious of the fact that it is time for class and yet somehow I am not in class.

 

 

Well, this is unexpected. Our Tuscan adventure has now made it into the mainstream national media.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/third-places-meet-new-people-pandemic/629468/

I have to say, it seems breezier in The Atlantic than it does here in Colorado in the midst of the packing boxes.

 I am sitting in my office right now. The northern light from my big window is lovely and serene. There are no books on the shelves in here anymore. There are no pictures of the children around. Almost everything has been taken down from the corkboard so that there is nothing left except ghost shadows left from so many years of being faded by the sun. No one else is around and it is so quiet that I can hear the clock ticking. I am waiting for time to go to class.

The feeling of waiting is particularly pronounced in this moment, but it is there -- more or less -- all the time now. Our friend the electrician did not show yesterday to prepare us for our inspection exam. There was a scheduling snafu and now he is coming next week instead. We are waiting.

We have almost completely sorted through the books and clothes; we don't go to the storage unit every day anymore. The other things in the house can't go yet because we are still living here, still using them. I did get a wild notion last Tuesday (brought on by having attended the Chair's Meeting last Monday) that we could go ahead and store some of our less necessary furniture, so I took away a little table we had in the bathroom. Then I came back and wandered around forlornly for a while holding my hairbrush in my hand and realizing that I had nowhere to put it down.

I made a bunch of origami swans to put on my office shelves because the emptiness seemed so sad.

We are having cauliflower with dinner tonight for the second time this week. We are tired of cauliflower, but we are even more tired of broccoli. It's just the tail-end-of-winter blues (still cold and grey here) and we will get over it, but in the meantime, while eating our cauliflower, we sit around and dream of Italy.

Last night, we looked deeply into the restaurant that is closest to our rustic farmhouse -- easy walking distance, open today until midnight. "What," we asked ourselves, "will be on the menu of the place where we are destined to become regulars?"

This:

This is also true right here at our house in Colorado, but it seems more charming when it happens in Italy.

 

This past week was the first week of the last class that I will ever teach at Colorado College. On Monday, I cried twice -- once in class and once later in the day. I will admit that I am an easy crier, but it usually takes more than handing out a syllabus to turn on the sprinklers.

On Tuesday, I wrote on the white board with what I thought was a white board marker.

On Wednesday, it actually snowed underneath the covid-induced tent where class is held. Flakes blew in sideways while I was dividing the class into discussion groups for Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. All of the groups decided to go elsewhere to discuss. Shockingly.

On Thursday, nothing much happened. We had class prophylactically on Zoom, but the sun unexpectedly appeared, the temperature climbed, and -- against all weather predictions to the contrary -- it was the warmest day of the week. I finally abandoned all hope of ever being prepared for upcoming weather and decided to just utterly surrender myself to the caprices of the weather gods and the certainties of wool socks.

On Friday, I discovered that the thing I wrote on the white board on Tuesday is now permanently inscribed. Oops. I do wish that it had at least been something profound, but it was, alas, not.