Last night, I found a spider in our bed -- for the second night in a row. Not exactly an event to send you sweetly into the land of slumber.

I think we must have done something to rile them up - probably all of this talk about Marxism that goes on around here. The are uniting in fellow feeling with the other bloodsuckers (I'm looking at you, oil company executives) to take us down.

But Tris says it's just because Jonathan and I are now sleeping on a futon right on the floor, depriving the spiders of all the welcoming dusty places where they used to lurk so comfortably underneath the bed. The charm of sleeping together on the floor like we used to do in college has begun to wear thin.

The real estate agent was here last week to talk about "staging" our house.

"Don't move your furniture out," she said, standing in our living room.

"We already have," I said.

Apparently, we look like the sort of people who would have a decorating scheme that features cardboard boxes from the grocery store as a decorating focal point. Perhaps we specially hired The Grinch to come in and do up the place with his famous "nothing left on the walls but some hooks and old wire" aesthetic. The garbage bags marked "ARC" right inside the front door are an especially elegant touch, I think. Architectural Digest agrees -- they are bringing a photographer by later this afternoon.

I screamed when I found the spider last night and Jonathan came running with a shoe to vanquish it.

"You know," he said, "there will be a lot more spiders in Italy."

Yes. But there will also be -- famously -- a lot more shoes.

The landscapers are here today, using actual muscle power to dig up the weeds that I have been merely snatching at in a desultory way for over twenty years. The workers seem very competent and knowledgeable and efficient. After experiencing me all this time, I hope the contrast doesn't cause the lawn to die of shock.

 

On a sudden whim this afternoon, we booked our non-refundable, one-way airline tickets to Milan. In nine weeks, we will fly out of the airport in Colorado Springs, where I have flown out so many times. And in nine weeks and one day, we will land in Milan. I am already anticipating the tears in my heart when I close the door to this house for the last time.

But also I am anticipating arriving in Italy and beginning a whole new life there, Jonathan and I together. Jonathan's friend Jennryn said to him the other day, "Ah, soon you will be sitting there with a glass of wine and a fistful of prosciutto!" We laughed and now hold that image as a beacon in our heads while we take camping gear and cookware to donate to the ARC in heavy boxes and bags.

And so I lead a schizophrenic life -- half of me trying to savor every last feeling and sound and smell and image from this world where I have lived so long and half of me lost in daydreams and visions of a new life far away. I can't wait to leave; I don't want to say good-bye.

And so without ever planning to do so today, we have bought our tickets. When torn or in doubt, I have always chosen to act rashly. I have no regrets.

 

In many ways, I became an academic in the first place because I love to read. Ironically, now that I have retired, I finally have time to read books for pleasure again. Even more ironically, the book that I am currently reading purely for pleasure (and enjoying enormously) is Mary Gabriel's biography of Jenny and Karl Marx, Love and Capital. I am currently up to the momentous year of 1848 and Gabriel's discussions of the horrors of unfettered capitalism, wealth inequality, and the economic transformations of industrialization are riveting. And enraging. That a society would be OK with people having to live like this!

Mudlarks, for example, were people (often children) who were pushed by poverty into trying to scrape the most meagre living by scouring the mud on the banks of the River Thames in London for whatever they could scavenge that they might be able to sell. There among the garbage, raw sewage, and corpses of dead dogs and cats (and sometimes humans), they might find a few pennies worth of something to sell and eke out another day of existence. 

Mind you, this was happening in sight of the towers and palaces of the rulers of an empire, of Queen Victoria herself. Those rulers had every reason to fear that Marx was right and that these oppressed and starving people would one day rise up in revolution. Justice would have demanded it.

I met a mudlark at our storage unit a couple of days ago. She cleans out houses that have been foreclosed and apartments where people have been evicted. Quite a lot of stuff is usually left behind and she scavenges what she can and stores it in her unit, hoping to be able to sell it somewhere. 

We talked about the recent spate of robberies at the facility. Someone has been cutting through the locking hardware on the individual units with bolt cutters and making off with the stuff inside.

"But who would want all this junk?" I said, looking at our stacks of used math books and boxes of baby pictures.

"Oh," she said, "People will take anything they can get these days."

Alas, in this version of 1848, we seem more likely to end up with fascism than any utopia.

Writing aobut the events of 1848, Marx said that everything in history happens twice -- the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Perhaps if we are lucky.

 p.s. After dinner tonight, I went out to the backyard and buried my face in the honeysuckle, inhaling it. After a day spent fretting about the damp, it is important to remember the honeysuckle.

We had maintained a high degree of hope. This is because an unflagging optimism is the essential hallmark of our characters. And also because the recent residencies of both the plumber and the electrician had led us into an, as it turns out, unreasonably rosy view. But the real estate agent, who came for the first time today, did not beat around the bush.

We have damp.

Not fatal damp. Not damp that cannot be ameliorated. But damp nonetheless.

How is it possible, we ask ourselves, living as we do in a freaking desert, that we have damp? Wildfires rage around us. The backyard shrubbery withers in the relentless sun. My own personal skin is so dry that I am beginning to look like beef jerky (well, I'm pretty pale, so I guess chicken jerky.) But my house! My house has moisture to spare! My lips are cracked, the skin of my heels is like hooves. My hair is as dry as straw. But my basement is moist and glossy.

The Clairol Company called. They want the basement to star in a new series of conditioner advertisements where there will be several slo-mo shots of it to show how silky and moisture-rich it is. I asked if we would shoot on location or if the house would have to travel to Hollywood. They are checking with the producers and will call us back. We hope the residuals will cover the costs of repairing the damp. Fingers crossed!

The honeysuckle is riotously blooming out back. I cut some tendrils and put them in a champagne glass that we haven't packed yet -- saved out in case we need to drink champagne. One never knows. I have the honeysuckle next to the camp chair, which is one of the few chairs left in the house. Now I get little whiffs of summer whenever I am sitting there.

We rented a cargo van just for one day and made good use of Tris's muscles to take everything that won't fit into the back of the car to the storage unit. Consequently, we are eating on a little side table, the three of us huddled around it like Macbeth's witches, and we are sitting down wherever we can find a place. Jonathan and I are now sleeping on a futon on the floor, just like we were doing in 1986, only the floor seems to have gotten lower down than it was when we were in college. And harder. I congratulate myself whenever I get up off of it, perhaps too much.

And today I found out that Stanford University Press has accepted my new book -- one that I have been working on, rather intermittently, for almost ten years now. It started sort of as almost a joke -- just something to say whenever anyone asked me what I was writing when I wasn't writing anything. But the more I thought about it, the more real it became and somehow somewhere along the way I actually started really working on it.

And now I have five weeks to finish it up. Tomorrow, I will write a methodology. I will not mention that it all started as sort of a joke.