We had not had rain for two days. Yesterday the sky was starkly blue. Today it is a high, pale gray. And then it lowered and began to rain persistently. A week ago, the sky was pouring, the backyard a small lake beneath the pine. It is spring in Oregon and the weather a daily coin toss. Spring is fickle. Flannel shirts are going back in the cupboard, but we carry coats against the sudden turn in weather.

We are between living places just now. Our belongings for the temporary apartment are being boxed and gradually carted away. The house is divided into three staging points: apartment, short-term storage for the new house, and things being discarded. Surrounding the staging points are our belongings, waiting to be designated. It has been a tiresome process both physically and emotionally.

After a fatiguing day, it is our habit to stir up an easy meal, lean back, and review and evaluate. Tonight, I’ve made campfire stew (vegetable beef soup stirred into a pound of fried hamburger). We’ll put our feet up soon and enjoy the warm soup with buttered crackers. Eventually we talk about our day. It is a process guaranteed to unwind and release the day’s tension.

 My writing process is stuck. I think that, in part, since we stopped traveling,  I don’t have the fresh surroundings and activity to provide me with fuel for my reflection. Ideas and key phrases come to me, but I can’t get them to lead anywhere. The ideas just do not connect or address an issue on my mind. Most often when I get this way, I need to clear the pipes, look at all the ideas bouncing around, address them briefly, then let them go. It’s a bit like inventorying the junk drawer, sorting, and discarding all the bits I’ve tossed in there because I couldn’t find an immediate purpose. (I know this is incredibly poor grammar, but that’s what happens when there’s too much clutter.) That being said, I’ve ventured to share those snippets because I like them, even if I can’t find an immediate setting for them.

1. Sorting books recently, I came across a “Weekly Reader” book on the life of Theodore Roosevelt. It was one of the first books I owned. His perseverance in overcoming poor health in his childhood through determination and a refusal to give up was a lesson I carried with me and tried to emulate. We don’t seem to have childhood heroes much anymore and that is what I wanted to work through. Growing up, I had eight girl cousins. I was the only boy at any family function.  One cousin was everything I wanted to be. She was smart and excelled in drama and forensics. Jackie was the oldest and to my mind the leader of the cousins. I was proud to be related to her. She made a quiet difference in my life. Do we still have heroes who urge us on to better things? I hope so. I want to be one.
2. To my wife’s despair, my tendency over the years is to clean house by tossing stuff into the nearest closet. In some remote corners a sort of stratification apparently developed. As we began our moving process, I began to develop a new branch of the Humanities, which I choose to call “Closet Archaeology” to explore this phenomenon. I’ve not labeled the layers yet though as some objects appear to cross several years of build-up, and so disrupt exact stratification. Hats are an example of this phenomenon. Western hats, primarily cowboy hats are distributed across several of the lower layers. They give way to a variety of ethnic hats such as Scottish Glengarries and Balmorals, and an English Deerstalker cap. The western hats then reappear in a variety of sizes before a wide variety of baseball hats replace them. Finally a collection of various flexible hats that might be posited as practical rain gear.  The main component of all layers seems to be old shoes, bent, curled, and dusty, held together by occasional shirts or socks, which act as a sort of stabilizing glue.

Closet archaeology seeks to solve the mystery of the hats – “ritual or functional” and why discarding old shoes seems to have been prohibited.

• Why do I keep bits of string and broken rubber bands? Is there a connection? (Pun intended).
• Why do I have 47 walking sticks and at least 30 pocketknives? I have 23 little flash-lights in drawers all around the house. I don’t know what I am expecting to happen, but when it does, I am ready!

I feel like I have just had a good sneeze!  We’ll see what the next inspiration has to offer.

Blessings.

The Road