Amid the Detritus

It's been several gloomy days in a row, and this is yet another one--chilly, dreary, and damp. Outside the studio window the leaves are all down from the trees, even the ones in the ravine which are normally not down until December. The sculpture garden is a complete mess of brown leaves, just like this studio is a complete mess of brown and gray boxes and piles of old papers and miscellany waiting to be taken up to the trash bin.

All my art supplies are now in big labeled boxes and stacked three boxes high. The easel stands forlorn. This desk is still cluttered, with about twelve stacks of papers and notebooks and file folders, and the relationship between stacks is incoherent. About the only thing that makes sense is this computer, and perhaps also my mug of coffee. It's probably the last day I will work here at this desk, in front of this window, with this computer, and I want to savor it, gloomy day or no.

During this packing and sorting foray I've come across things which I'd brought here 15 years ago, from the last time I'd lived in Valparaiso, drawings and papers and items intended for assemblages and then forgotten as life turned out to have demands I never could have anticipated. If you have children, you will do the most direct thing for their benefit, even if it leads you well off the path you thought you were on. Of course it takes a while to correct the course.

Fortunately the conviction that I'm making changes to ease the demands on my time and body and wallet keeps my spirits up. I've only been in this studio for just over a year and sometimes I just can't believe that I'm packing everything up and making changes in my working space again. And there's the house and the garden, as well: I know every tree, every shrub, every brick, every object that I see from the window. I look down at the desk, a big door I'd stained an oak color and stenciled with a green diamond border when I first moved here. It sat atop a pair of green file cabinets and was my first dining room table. My entire family at that time sat around it for our first Thanksgiving dinner here. Except for Nick and my parents, everyone has passed away. The little boy who trimmed radishes in the kitchen that day is grown and married and has a kitchen of his own. Life is not now what it was then, and I've lived here during all those changes. I grew up here, to be honest, in the sense I'd learned to stand on my own two feet mentally, fiscally, and emotionally.

Nonetheless, the investment in this place is portable. People talk about sweat equity and attachment to a place or to the land or history, and use that as part of their strong reasons for wanting to stay put in spite of compelling reasons to pull up stakes and leave. But I've put in so much hands-on effort into every place I've ever lived, and if there is one thing I know to be true, is that the effort is part of my own inherent way of being in the world, that I couldn't not do it. So nothing, really, is wasted. It's all gone to imparting my existence upon the world, and the effort has shaped me into what I am now. It's all transient, yet it's all permanent, in the sense that I live permanently in the present, the sum total of every moment past, and thus am already contributing to the future.

So "home" is actually any place I choose it to be. Steve is the same way, and since we choose to be together, it follows that home is where each other is at and we'll imprint our presence upon the space we find ourselves in.

Of course that doesn't mean that I am not nearly overwhelmed by the demands of moving house and studio, and can't wait to get settled in!