This is the End, My Friend, The End

I am thinking of the song by the rock group known as "The Doors." It is now in the 20s outside and the glass is covered with condensation, the little electric heaters are kicking out their BTUs and we are on our final logs of wood. The final pieces out of the most expensive cord of wood we ever bought two months ago. When I think of some of those fires back in early October, fires for effect more than necessity, when we did not really need them, I think: consevere, conserve! It is a lesson to learn, and learn again. Now we are "holding the fort" a day or two longer, through Thanksgiving, through the beginning of next week and it feels as though we are camping out here like swamp yankees, like Hillbilly Clampets by the Sea. The daughter loves this, of course, but its allure is diminished for me. I worry about the pipes freezing. This is more serious business. In only a week, we will be ensconced in an insulated, well-heated house in Providence. We will have money in the bank, our bills will have all been paid, and we can look ahead, I hope, to less constricted, less circumscribed times. Let's hope that all goes according to plan, and that Mother Nature forebears. May we eke it through somehow. We will survive. This is not "The end, my friend" as Jim Morrison once put it.

The Last Week

These are the final days of the year at Stonepile. Once again, camped out before the fireplace, dogs in and on or under the sleeping bags, head beside me on the pillow the past two nights. I gave them and the daughter, across the room in her own sofabedding, the slip, off to my own bed with my wife. It is fun because it is only temporary; we will be out of here none too soon. Tonight, I worry, will be ten degrees below freezing, and that could prove to be a problem. We shall soon see. Most evident besides the chilled breath in the air is the rush of northwest wind across the tarpaulined roof, the brilliant red of certain small trees, the chartreuse of the frozen bittersweet, and the seaward march of white-capped waves. Suddenly, there are no leaves left in the trees, all blown away in the past week or two, leaving the skeletal remains to shine a grayish white to my eyes in the morning sun. It is beautiful, as always, but it is time to move camp, to become urbanites again until the time of longer days, of milder temperatures, of spring. I miss it, and I am still here!

Woody

Woody, the oversized Dachschund is seriously impaired. He can walk; he cannot run. Like most animals, he bears his pain mutely, and anthropomorphized, he is a brave young man, way to young to have such a problem. I fear for him. Back problems in these long, low dogs is always a threat. We do not have the kind of money that it takes to have a vet diagnose this sort of thing. He has to mend himself, or his outcome is terrible. I love this dog. He is wild and excitable and a huge challenge in the car or at the beach, but he is beautiful and affectionate with me, at least.

Woody's bout with his back problem comes at a difficult time. Tomorrow we rent a van and over the weekend we pack and deliver its contents to Rhode Island. Yesterday we found a place on College Hill for the winter months, through Memorial Day weekend, and today the real closing date has been set for the last Monday in the month. I fee the emotional and financial pressures mounting, the tug of the wretched Undertoad pulling at me, trying to drag me to a stop and down, and I am fighting the urge to panic or to bolt that I often feel. I am deeply saddened by the reality of leaving our old town, however challenging it may have been to remain there all of these years. It is hard to see the resolution as a win; it is all to easy to see it as among life's many defeats. Woody is the poor dachschund who's back has more or less literally been broken by our debacle. He symbolizes untimely defeat to me right now. I hope he may cure himself at the eleventh hour and close to midnight. I hope to quash the ugly Undertoad's vain efforts to suck me away into some negative space I can ill afford. I need to move ahead, to hold my head high for everyone around me's sake. There are no options. This is life and every other option is irrevocable, it seems to me. Come on, Woody! Let's not bend and break, but mend.

Decisive Moment

L'image sauvette, Henri Cartier-Bresson's term for the perfect, still moment captured. If there is one, perhaps it is right now. The house is ripped apart with boxes packed and half-packed, a dumpster by the barn, the barn nearly emptied for the first time in nearly 18 years, the tool shed nearly in the same state, and all of us exhausted. Sally nearly did herself in, carrying a bed down the barn stairs and falling off about three steps from the bottom. She called for help and I ran across the yard to find her on her back, bruised but OK, at least so far. She'll be stiff tomorrow, for sure.

The water man came, the third time. We bleached the water or shocked the well, as you prefer. I hope we'll find a more positive result this time around. This has become a troublesome spot for us, while the mortgage approval for the buyers has stalled and now livened up, with two companies competing to have the new mortgage. It sounds good for the buyers. We hope to close at the beginning of next week. We have an apartment to rent in Providence, through the end of May. The ducks are lining up. Of course we are broke. I was hoping to use American Express, my Gold standard for 23 years, only to find the card's been cancelled due to loyalty on my part. I have no faith in that institution. I feel abandoned. Here I am, looking backwards at all these years in this ancient place where so much happened in our lives, thinking about the town we are leaving, while looking ahead, to whatever is around the corner. Resolution is the first thing, and then, how to live, now not to repeat our mistakes, so many of which have surfaced in the boxes and letters I've rushed through over the past few weeks. It is amazing to see how beaten down I have become over the years. Not long ago, I thought I had the world by the short hairs. I haven't felt that way for many years, the attrition caused by too many defeats. This revitalizes and tells me to press on regardless, to never accept defeat, as I am afraid I have. This move is the catharsis of leaving the disasters behind, of emerging stronger and prepared for the next chapter of our lives. It is never easy, is it?

The Wife

The Wife siddles by me, glaring. She's looking for her carkeys. She never puts them in the same place twice and inevitably cannot locate them when she wants to toodle. She has big issues with this sort of thing. I, on the other hand, do not. I do, however, have plenty of my own issues. Anyway, she is raging this morning because I mistook a minister's email regarding her sermon. She, the minister, referenced a Curtis Mayfield song from the 60s, get on board the train, but reading her words quickly, she mentions the OJ's "Love Train" which Mayfields' song is clearly not. Apparently I was condescending in the way I noted this, setting The Wife on a fou-mouthed tirade, one of her worst to date, featuring the epithlet "fuckingasshole," that's one word in every spluttering sentence. There may have been froth at the mouth. It was a bit over the top, in my opinion, but since I inevitably trigger such rage with a careless word or a glance, I need to say I'm sorry, which does not come quickly when I neither feel sorry, nor feel I should be. Fulton Street fish market moved this past week from lower Manhattan for the first time in nearly two hundred years. I think the fisherman's wife may have moved all the way into Westchester, too. Otherwise, change is in the air, but Indian Sumer abounds. Our house is up in boxes and our emotional state is flaming, furious. The Wife has found her keys and has headed to the market to find today's ugly news in The Times. Good riddance to Her Rottenness, My Wife!

We're Spirits

Driving through our old town this evening on the way to the supermarket felt strange. I have been here in this town for 17 years and in the region for 28, and I will not have a place here to call home. We pass places, houses of people we know, and I think I am but a spirit passing through. These people will not have a conscious thought about me or my family, or maybe a flickering recollection prompted by something, then gone. What is the difference between living elsewhere and dying? In many ways, it is only the ceremony, as far as I can understand things. It is so much like the concept that our friends and forebears are stilll with us, watching our foibles, our triumphs and defeats, somewhere high and unseen. But I don't subscribe to this notion any more, another story. I believe in the here and now and though I have not maximized it, I can still try to; it is never too late, until I am really dead. And I could, if I chose, stop and visit, or call and surprise someone. My daughter doesn't see things this way. We are still here, in town and until we have physically moved, we live here. Although she is literally correct; in only a few weeks, we will be gone. It is a chapter closed. This time is one of suspension, of limbo. But unlike the same situation a year ago, there is an end to it. What happens after this Time for Change of ours shifts, and the pressures of the past few years are off, with a new set of issues to replace them? Will we feel different? Will we be different, have different prospects, different attitudes? I cannnot say right now, it remains a mystery. The new ground is inevitable at this point, so let's bring it on and test the waters. We will be in for real, no longer just testing things out.

The Morn of Inspection

The ground is so wet, I need knee boots to walk the fields. And it is mild, warming through the night instead of chilling down. I'll take it. With the blue tarp fortifying the porous roof above me, most of the leaks have ceased their leaking. Even though there has yet to be a frost, the brush begins to open, allowing a glimpse of a pond unseen all summer, or a house that was heretofore been shrouded in green. It being a time for change, and this being the fulcrum, the balance point, it seems appropriate to be headed off to the new doctor today. I have no aches or pains. It is a well-care visit. Should I tell the doctor that I am as fat and full of cholesterol as I've ever been in my life, and feeling like a capon or just let him figure things out for himself? Wait until the blood work returns. I've eaten more of the bad things, like shrimp or bacon and eggs this year than in the previous three or five. And I stopped running early last month, for whatever reason. My ankles were so stiff afterwards that I was limping around. At least that precipitated the interruption. The doctor's going to do his procto thing and ask a lot of personal questions. I hope he is as good as the recommendation from Mary that put me into his hands. The rain ought to cease and I can go outside to see what yesterday and last night's winds and rain hath wrought at Stonepile. The ocean swells parade up the river, equidistant arcs of liquid energy. On the far side, they smash onto the rocks in explosions of white spray that rips along the cliffs. This violence is impotent from up above and at a distance. It would be another story altogether were I to be among the waves themselves. Here I am, inspecting.

Frantic

When things change, they inevitably change quickly. Here it is, in the just-above-freezing zone, about to move, about to close on the sale of the house, about to rent an apartment. And sick in the pit of the stomach about thet logistics of the operations. So many things can foul up; the important thing is to stay calm and remember these things happen all of the time and that we can deal with every eventuality, and if we cannot, then we cannot do much about it any way. The limbo is abruptly coming to an end. The Time for Change will need a new name, like the Old Settler Resettles or Moving In or, in this case, Providence. I am a creature that likes order and can sometimes feel panic amongst chaos. Knowing this should arm me for what's to come. I feel as though I ought to have a motto like those found on the crests of English Nobility, like "Courage" or "Confidence" or how about "Cope." I actually have one, officially, but I don't know it. There is one on the wall, chosen and petit pointed by my wife at what was home: "Fluctuat Nec Mergitur." She made it up many years ago, and who knows whether the Latin is correct. Translated, it is supposed to say "Tosses but does not Sink." That's not bad. We are going to come through this storm.

November

There should be a November song, but I don't know any. We are here again, another fall has come and winter's around the corner, but this time it is really different. The cold has arrived; the sere colors of New England's deciduous trees abounds. The summer people have long gone; the vegetables changed from tomatoes and lettuce to pumpkins and squash and now they themselves have all but closed, filling up instead with Christmas ornaments and chotzkhis, desperately marked up, impulse shopping junk to briefly sate the compulsion to buy, to fill to squander. And the rain and wind have increased dramatically, especially this year, with the highest recorded rainfall in a hundred years in the region. It is different this time because we are finally moving from New York, house sold, books and bureaus packed. It will not be very much longer now until we are Rhode Island residents, no longer New Yorkers. As with most things, it is a bittersweet resolution. We will miss people, places and longevity in a place which is irreplaceable, but it is not as though we do not have longevity in our "new" home. I have lived here since the first month of my life, and so has my daughter, and my wife may as well have. She's been coming here for nearly thirty years. The change has been good, on balance, and although I thought twelve months ago it would have been a picnic and it has been more like a cliff walk or dancing on a bed of coals, we are but a step away from making it intact. Scathed, but intact. And this is a good thing. Moving on, moving forward. I have been watching a flock of gulls working the bay between Brown and Church, and I am mystified. In honor of the find day, of the mystery and my curiosity about what it is they are following, I am going to risk my perfect record fishing and make a few casts into the Sakonnet. I can accept no fish or a blemished record for the privilege of the exercise. My last 'fish' of the year. Who knows. It's November, and I am here by the sea, fishing! It's amazing, man!