Winter Dreams

So, my surprise for December was supposed to be "winter stratification", which is where you take old discarded plastic containers and make mini-greenhouses for plants which need winter cold to germinate. Ideally this is done at the winter Solstice. Check your timepiece; I'm late.

What can I say, this entire building-a-house thing is complicated. Right now the complication is that I have too much stuff to fit into the small house that we've built. Somehow the obvious response, "build it bigger" does not amuse my husband nor fit our budget. So I am faced with the completely ridiculous notion of getting rid of stuff. Understand, this is not just about me...my guys need to drop a load too.

I do have the most "stuff", mostly miles of books, assiduously collected and special books, on a multitude of subjects. Special subjects, like Celtic mythology, world religions, cooking specialty food, architecture, agroforestry, shamanism and magic, art, poultry keeping, and a wall each on plumbing and electrical, gardening, roses (a wall unto themselves, my rose books), psychology and enneagrams, permaculture, aquaculture, health and healing, Chinese medicine...you get the idea. There are not enough bookcases for my books, they inhabit rooms. And fill the large dining room table, and several enormous antique amoires...and chests of drawers and boxes in the garage. I could describe the content of each of these books at length...they are well marked with tabbed pages, margins scribbled and notes written in the before-and-after pages. Parting with even one would be painful.

The other major obstacle to down sizing is my depression glass collection. This took me more than 20 years to assemble, I bought my first piece when I was 15...I have had everything. Any pattern or color you can think of in depression glass, I either have it or have given it to special friends. Any piece of depression glass, except carnival glass, that you can think of I have owned, no matter how rare. I gave a lot of it away or sold some the last time we downsized, keeping only the reds, gold, and greens. And only 3 patterns of each, with a few special exceptions. That's still a lot of glass, packed in a lot of boxes. When we owned the Victorian there were enough odd nooks and walls that I could display everything. The sunlight would work its way in through the tall windows and reflect off of the colored glass in rainbow glints. I loved to watch the sun move across the room in my office as I worked, gleaming with various colors as the light hit cabinets spaced according to the path of the light. This new house is a budget house, modern with no spare corners for a glass etagerie (or 3).

I find that there are obsessions in my life that other people don't have, and these take up space. Books, depression glass, vitamins ( I have closets full of specialty vitamins, wierd, I know), knitting yarn, gardening catalogs and seeds. I hate to sleep and have no time or interest for TV because there's something to keep me interested in every moment of the day and night. I don't know if there are enough hours and days in my life to satisfy my passion for permaculture and agroforesty. Certainly there's not enough square footage in the new house.

I severely downsized (by storage spaces rented, not by elimination) when we lived at our last place, a 1200 s.f. mobile home which was intended to be temporary while we built our "real" house there. One year turned into two, and we still hadn't built because our building site had soil stabilization issues. One entire side of the hill eventually collapsed and we gave up on that site...and I realized that I had put 2 years of my life on "hold" , in "storage". So this time I am truly downsizing...not placing in storage. it's really a challenge because I have to leave enough of my obsessions so that I'm really involved in life and not waiting for life to begin again. It greatly helps that we'll have two greenhouses and lots of land to plant on. Still, this is a winnowing period for me, a cutting away of old interests and passions to make way for the new. it's exhausting.