Rearranging...and cheese straws...

A few days ago, when asked what I planned to do over the weekend - one of those pleasant sort of non-committal questions we ask to make conversation - I replied that I thought I might take a day trip to Galveston just to sit on the beach, look out over the horizon and listen to the waves. It's about a 50 mile drive, so not too stressful...and a complete change of scene...and there are tasty shrimp to be found.

But then, I had forgotten that I had a date with the company that maintains my heater at home, so I needed to be there. I decided to rearrange the landscape of my bedroom instead. We are not talking about anything huge, just an addition of a small folding table, and a removal of clutter on the floor and accumulated boxes. My life in that room is about addressing my music, writing, crochet, reading, relaxing...generally re-creating myself when I can't get away to Galveston or elsewhere. The problem is that creative spaces tend to get cluttered, and then, start to drive you as crazy as the parts of your life over which you have no control.

So, I rearranged, reorganized, restructured, re-shuffled. And then I made faux food cheese straws for Yuletide - our next installation at work. Surely there is some kind of irony in that.

Experiences...

It's a simple ferry trip across the water from Bolivar Peninsula to Galveston Island. I have been known to drive the 50 miles to the coast just to drive or walk onto the ferry and stand as these people are, feeling and smelling the salty breeze and watching the horizon for ships coming into the port. Hoping to see dolphins running alongside and waiting for the random spray that happens when the ferry crosses the wake of another boat on the water.

It occurred to me today, as I was loading the dishwasher and de-cluttering the countertops in order to spray them liberally with disinfectant spray/degreaser/de-everything-else (and going through in my mind all of the other chores that need doing) that one attribute of our family that seems to be a constant over the generations is that we value all sorts of experiences. We value a good adventure, and love to make record of it. I think what brought this to mind was the knowledge of the 25- 30 photo boxes of prints lurking on the upper shelf of our hall closet, put there years ago to protect them from the possibility of flood waters during/after a hurricane, and then left there as it seemed a practical place in the end. This is what happens when you love to take pictures, your parents love to take pictures and you marry someone who also loves to take pictures. The wonderful thing about the digital camera is that you don't necessarily have to print every single thing. Thus, the volume of prints has managed to decline remarkably since we all bought into digital wizardry.

The point though is that I need to go through those boxes, narrow the field, and scan those favorites into digital images in order to consolidate for an eventual move out of a 3 bedroom house into an apartment. So, how does one decide what to keep. Well, of course, there will always be captured expressions about which you'll say, "Well, that is a keeper." And there will be some that illustrated the releationships we had with those now departed from this life. And then there will be the ones that capture the essence of experiences we shared - times of being together outside of the everyday, learning together, laughing together, feasting together...our adventures that contributed to making us who we are.

It will be a difficult thing, perhaps, because I hold all of it dear, but now that many years have passed, I find some of those experiences have crystalized into a purer form. Perhaps it will be easier than I think.