Settling

We’ve been in the house for a week. I still have five boxes to unpack and far too many clothes in suitcases and bins. But the all the rooms are functional and the floor is pretty clear except in the guest room. Jay was home last week, which made a huge difference in getting some of the big jobs done. Unpacking is interesting. I never watched the de-cluttering specialist who was so popular, Marie Kondo, but I know that she talks about things that bring you joy. I found some, opening boxes. They are mostly small things – wooden bowls we bought from the woodworker at the Farmers Market, a glass napkin holder I bought for my Mom on a lovely outing with her. But as I unpack so many boxes I wonder why we brought so much stuff – why we own so much stuff. I swear, the linens multiplied in transit, breeding in the dark privacy of the boxes. And a kitchen with limited storage space teaches you that less would be more.

But for all the challenges of dealing with stuff, the big joy is feeling at home. When Charlie and I walk we almost always see people and dogs we recognize now. The network of trails around here is a joy, and I think it has an important impact on the community. Bike lanes are a fine thing, but bikers can’t be very friendly because they have to stay alert for traffic. Sidewalks are fine for pedestrians and dogs, but they’re interrupted by driveways and right next to parked or moving cars. They offer no sense of intimacy, relaxation or friendliness. People do greet each other on sidewalks, but there is not the invitation to stop for a moment, to let the dogs sniff one another, to let the humans connect with a little more than the briefest good morning. The trails are made for us in a way that sidewalks are not. They invite friendliness. I think they greatly impact my experience of the neighborhood and my feeling about my neighbors. I feel surrounded by mostly friendly people. I feel we share the town. This will seem so ordinary to people who live in Cooperstown or Hartwick, but it is not ordinary here. Public spaces here are so dominated by cars, and people spend so much time separated from one another and moving very fast. I think that car born behavior carries over into other encounters – moving as if isolated from each other and perhaps in competition with each other for a lane or a parking place. The trails help break that paradigm. Even the speedy bikers mostly pass us with a friendly, “on your left”, although occasionally one whizzes by nearly silently and gives me a start. The trail has made it easy for me to feel at home here.

I’m starting to know my way around a little, to not need GPS for a lot of errands. Unfortunately, one of the routes I know is the way to the DMV. We changed our registrations to California, but that took two trips because I didn’t realize that we had to bring both cars there for inspection. We got California drivers’ licenses, but that took two trips because the clerk deemed our proof of residence inadequate for the real-ids which we wanted. And I have another trip tomorrow to transfer title of the Prius we bought for Jay’s long commute, and to straighten out a problem with the title transfer of the RV. This is not the Cooperstown DMV where there are two windows and a cashier’s station. This is a place where you line up to get a number and then wait with a hundred or so other folks for the mechanical voice to call your number over the loudspeaker and tell you which of 20 windows you should go to. It’s not Dante’s inferno, but it definitely doesn’t bring me joy. I suspect that Kafka had a hand in the design of the systems they use.

I also know the way to our Sunday afternoon al-anon meeting, and that does bring me joy. We’ve been to the meeting four times in a row, so we know people and they know us. It’s not all joy. Last week one of the attendees was dealing with the very recent death of her son by overdose. One of his grandmothers was there too. It is the dread of every parent of an addicted child, the phone call you know you have to prepare for if you are realistic about addiction. At the meeting the Mom and Grandmother can talk about their broken hearts, knowing that they will be understood, that they will not be judged for this terrible outcome. So if there will not be joy for a long time, there is at least a measure of comfort of being in community, of facing our dread together. I have settled in to my share of losses in the sixteen years since my big sister, Shayne, died. But those losses pale beside the loss of a child. I don’t know how you ever settle in to that.