On floating away like a balloon, objects through the looking glass, and death in August
August 19, 2021
Dear Eva,
Do you ever have the experience of rereading your own letter from just last week and feeling like it was written by a stranger? I felt that way this time. Maybe The Great August Purge was just the antidote I needed for my particular strain of temporary burnout because somehow, it already feels like a distant memory. This is a good example of something you have talked about in the past—the way these letters serve as reflection points, which then help us mark time in a different sort of way than we do without this cadence of contemplation and documentation. If I had not written about my burst of decluttering and obligation-shedding last week, I probably would forget it ever happened. Long live the letters!
As you learned via text message, our epic garage sale turned out not to be as epic as we hoped. Although, I suppose it depends on how you measure it. Our ratio of buyers to customers was excellent, so we feel confident our pricing was on the mark. And we made close to $200 in cold hard cash, which is enough for S to sort and hide in various pillowcases for the foreseeable future. It was our marketing and advertising that went awry. All in all, I think we had about 20 separate parties over four hours of sitting in our driveway. This was a slow enough pace that J declared it “the worst garage sale ever” at one point, which probably has more to do with unrealistic expectations than objective garage sale failure. But in any case, we are persevering. We kept the goods in the garage, and we are planning to open up shop once more this Saturday to see what else we can sell. This decision is admittedly based partially on the desire to procrastinate on figuring out what to do with everything that did not sell. But it is also based on the fact that the garage sale experience was just plain enjoyable! Pleasant chit chat with strangers and neighbors, sipping iced coffee and eating pastries, watching kids and grownups alike find items they were excited to take home. I shall not lie: I am excited to spend my Saturday morning doing it all again!
Last week, I was fascinated to read about your attachment to the concept of escape, and I have been thinking about it ever since. I recall your previous statement that you enjoy identifying and pointing out ways in which we are different, and so you will be happy to know this may be one of the most striking differences between us. You wrote: rather than being entirely excited about moving toward something, I am often excited to be moving away from something. This feels completely foreign to me. While I have been pretty regularly moving and leaving places/jobs/people over the years (though less so in recent years), I can honestly say I do not think I ever considered a feeling of escape, just the pull toward something new. Is this secretly the same thing? I don’t think so. I am intrigued by the idea of escape; I think perhaps it requires a level of sturdy independence that I do not have. I think I am comforted by the web of humans and commitments within which I operate; they stabilize me.
This brings me to something I said on a call with you earlier today that I have since realized was not entirely true. I made an offhand comment about wishing we did not have to complicate our decisions about how to spend our time with concerns about money, an idea I have uttered many times before. But it occurred to me tonight just what a fiction that is in my own life. Money asserts its control in the form of a j-o-b, which then exerts control in the form of a zillion different obligations and responsibilities. Sometimes these weigh me down (see, for example, last week), but on the whole, if I am honest I think I am often grateful for the external nudges as to how to spend my hours. It is no coincidence that the one strand of my life that I consistently have the most difficulty prioritizing is the one that I do solely for myself—my creative practice, whatever shape that may take. I do not know exactly what this means, but it seems like a troubling recognition. Without work, would I float away like a balloon?
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It is now Friday, and I am sitting in my sweat after a good afternoon bike ride in the bright sun. Today on our phone call you mentioned the possibility of ending this letter-writing project in the nearish future, and I will admit that I feel like I am still reeling from this utterance. You are trying to escape! Ha! And predictable me is thinking mainly about the potential loss of a weekly structure I have come to depend upon these last three years. I fear these words will have the effect of making you feel bad, which is not my intent. I think you are probably right; we should consider whether there are ways to take this energy and evolve it into something new. My knee-jerk reaction is to focus on the loss, but it is also exciting to contemplate the potential! The possibilities are endless for what we might do next. The only thing I know is that I do not want to lose this steady cadence of meaningful collaboration with a trusted and inspiring co-conspirator. It has truly been life-changing and for that I thank you.
Have a wonderful weekend at home!
Yours,
Sarah
Friday August 20 2021
Dear Sarah,
It’s Friday night and I’m feeling some past-letter vibes, wherein I would settle in to write my letter to you on a sunsetty evening with a drink by my side. My drink is in place, but tonight we are finally expecting some rain, so the sky is grey and darkening. It’s feeling like a cozy preview of fall and winter! I wanted summer to last forever but there is a part of me that is looking forward to plumptious winter-wear and snowy walks and rosy cheeks. Before then, I’m thinking about reading some Halloween-y spooky or horror fiction; not my typical reads, but I’ve got vampires on my mind and I’m feeling inspired. With my now-three-years-deep return to seasonal living, I’m finding that I crave the process of settling into the spirit and the substance of any given season. I swear they are starting to tease Christmas-adjacent music on the classical station already, and Halloween candy is definitely in stock at the Hy-Vee across the way. Will I find myself storm-bound at your house again sometime this winter? We’ll see!
After your letter of last week and our latest advice column question with J, I’m thinking about climate change and the words I feel like I shouldn’t say aloud but will still write here: climate change is a problem that I didn’t specifically create; I am doing what I can (and will try to do more) to make sure I am not excessively contributing to climate change as an individual; and I think, though I do not know for certain, that climate change will probably not end the world during my lifetime — and so I am a bit less stressed about it than I would be if I thought the world were about to end. My life is definitely going to end; the odds so far seem in favor of the earth hanging on through the duration of my lifespan and beyond. How do any of us cope with the knowledge that things are definitely going to end, we know not when? We take for granted that we will have long lives; some of us will, and some of us will not. Through scientific advances and hard-earned knowledge we’ve dramatically increased the human lifespan since the mid-1800s. There is no great rhyme or reason to why some people live short lives and others press on into their 90s and 100s. I wanted to write “why some people live unexpectedly short lives,” but this is all part and parcel of the same thing: we expect a long life even though there is no real reason to assume such a thing. We want to live long lives because life is what we know; it is where our consciousness resides.
I find myself thinking back into patterns of language that I drafted in response to a prompt that you and J and I were working on a year ago, almost to the day; it appears that I made my last edits to a document titled Death or the Afterlife on August 19, 2020. Perhaps death is on my mind in August. Summer starts to wane, the garden is putting out its last waves of herbs and veggies, leaves start to fall from the trees (this is actually happening here, perhaps as a result of the hot, dry summer we’ve had).
To refer back to my feelings about the summer that could never live up to all we’d hoped for it… I have been equating summer with complete freedom from the pandemic, a completeness which did not come to pass, and also the idea that if the pandemic would be done forever, perhaps the summer would also go on forever? Perhaps I really should have settled for the longer term in Tucson with its 350+ days of sunshine a year, though then I’d be living the increasing reality of true drought in the desert.
In a confession that runs contrary to my intention to be climate-responsible, I have been taking greater advantage of Amazon Prime of late. I have a subscription on my dad’s behalf to send him from a distance the things he needs, and I enjoy the perks for myself as a side benefit. There is probably an article somewhere on the internet that will tell me whether there is any greater efficiency in using Amazon to ship me objects versus driving my own car to retrieve them (are those Amazon vans I see everywhere in any way better for the environment than my 2011 Subaru Forester?) but I am fairly certain that putting things in bags and boxes to be dropped at my door is not the best way to care for our home, the earth. And yet, I have been enjoying Amazon’s practice of sending me a photograph documenting their successful delivery of my package — there it is, waiting on the red folding chair outside the front door, or wedged in the sliver of space between the mat and the door’s threshold — and then opening the door, sometimes only moments later, to see the package from the other side: the through-the-looking-glass view of the photograph they sent. This just happened to me minutes ago and the experience is reminding me of an artist whose vibrant work I just learned of this week: the photographer Carolyn Drake, and specifically her project Ficciones, visual pairings exploring views of scenes and people from one angle and another, two sets of eyes on an almost-identical scene, just enough space in between to leave you wondering.
I am curious to break the digital seal on your letter this evening and see if you’ve revised it at all after our conversation today. (How would I know? I think I would know?) Our letters offer the turning of a new page every week; what might we find if they draw to a close? Might we press on into some new and exhilarating writing practice we have yet to meet? Or would we feel the emptiness too deeply, and return to the letters to start again? We have much talking and writing yet to do! Wishing you all the best for a lovely weekend and a garage sale redux that will put you on the fast track to retirement!
Until soon!
Yours,
Eva