One of my favorite spaces in our New Hampshire home is the herb room in the barn (as well as the kitchen, the pantry, the playhouse). Sadly, the gardens have suffered from benign neglect this summer as I have not lifted a trowel.
...but I'm not. July has been a whirlwind. It started, July 1st, with an offer on our house and progressed from there. Now, just over two weeks since the tea party on July 12, our house is a warehouse of boxes and furniture in various states of arrangement. My husband was right: no need to hire a moving company when he can do most of it. He is a whirling dervish (I help but it is one box to his twenty--I'm just not equipped for this but maybe it is because I have moved so many times before, in larger and larger increments from dorm to apartment to this house, but nothing like this). We have friends who have helped lug things and have hired a teenager who is an efficient packer, too. Our own children help where and when they can. In August, after melon season ends, Temple will be bringing back a car full of Mennonite friends who want to visit New England and also help here. I am sorry I will miss their visit in this house.
I have so many things I would have wanted to blog about this summer but I will tuck them away for August. They will at least still be seasonal and bear with me as I'll be writing more about New Hampshire, as well as Kentucky. I will need some writing time when I get settled in again and the boys start school (very early down there--something that will take some adjusting). And book projects beckon and are on the table (well, or in a box right now, as is most everything not nailed down or sat or slept upon).
So we will leave this house--two boys, our daughter, an elderly aunt, our very old and frail dog, and two weary middle-aged parents--on August 1st. My husband will soon return for the closing but we will not. It is a bittersweet time and I wish we had August to plod along with the rest of the packing and to take some more time to enjoy the summer. But we couldn't ask for a better window of opportunity to sell our home especially as, once it was listed last fall, we had no idea of our time line for selling it and moving out. We have been fortunate in all realms.
Perhaps it is best to leave when the sun is still high in the sky, before the Big Dipper has tipped below the barn, and well before the sad, plaintive song of the crickets in August. We will return to high summer in Kentucky, even though school will begin soon. There another life awaits us. I see our new home as the start of an adventure. The first time either of us has really been away from home in any great capacity, or too far from the "mother ships" that have been our family homes. Kentucky is a place where, like the early pioneers, we knew no one but have already made good friends and neighbors.
Transitions. This "odd uneven time." The poet Sylvia Plath mourned the end of summer in a journal entry on August 8, 1952:
Three years ago, the hot sticky August rain fell big and wet as I sat listlessly on my porch at home, crying over the way summer would not come again--never the same. The first story in print came from that 'never again' refrain beat out by the rain. August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
1 comment:
Pioneers! Yes! That is it exactly. We have become pioneers in our day and age.
The timing of everything - is it not perfect? I love how God does that! He is never too early, never too late but always on time. :O)
Catherine, I am praying for a safe trip for all of you back here. It will be so good to see y'all again! You will all have to come over and visit the puppies. They are getting so big and so very playful right now.
I will have to move my little guys to the kitchen here soon for they are almost able to climb out of the puppy pool. This will require moving everything out of the kitchen and into the music room for the next couple of weeks.
I will definitely see you on the 7th at Miss T's house.
Love to you all!
xoxo Cat
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