Member-only story
What Moves Last: Kitchen, Office, Art? Or My Heart?
Re-telling old traumas for these segments sometimes comes pretty easily — I’ve told them often enough to cover the wounds with thicker skin.
As these story segments recap the years very close to “now,” my typing fingers and soul seem less in synch. This hurts. In hopes of pain reduction, I write more, anyway.
When Every Day Counts, and Trouble Arrives
Mid May 2021, two years after Dave’s death: I’d sold the Old House, the home Dave and I crafted for ourselves and our bookshop and his massive book collection. With partnership from two family members in the next generation, I’d purchased a raw, trash-strewn chunk of land a bit further up the ridge; collaborated with an excavator owner and his truckers to tear down a collapsing wood structure and send 25 tons of truly disgusting waste to a landfill; and watched in exhilaration as a local concrete artist and his son reshaped the surface, poured a concrete pad for my new home to sit upon, and built connections for my newly drilled well and electrical power.
With the concrete curing, it was almost time for my “house” (a cabin-shaped manufactured home with a wide porch and pretty kitchen) to be hauled nine miles to the site. My contract said “first week of June.” My lease at the Old House expired June 19th…
