I’ve been obsessed with foxes lately, but this fearless bobcat (captured on my security feed) strutted right past me on Sunday afternoon, and now I’m whipsawing between worry and delight. Worry, because my kitty Mithril wants to sneak out the back door every chance he gets. Delight, because hey, we have a neighborhood bobcat.
As you know, bob*cats are willing to eat anything, so I need to keep Mithril indoors forever, and supervise Dulcie when she’s in the yard.
The bobcat can hang out in the mountains at the top of the arroyo, where there’s plenty of other things to eat. Mithril, meanwhile, can go on dreaming.
We’re mostly settled in New Mexico, but it still seems strange to call this place our home. It’s been only two months since the move, though it feels like the better part of a year. Packing our books and china, selling the old house, finding a moving company, outfitting the new house—it’s all been rather consuming, and I’ve had my head down (with blinders on) since July. I’ve been seriously obsessed. To misquote Longfellow, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make move.” We got safely to New Mexico without any major injuries and without breaking too many of our things, but every time I see a Penske or U-Haul truck, I feel a twinge of sympathy. Good luck, fellow travelers, and don’t drop anything on your toes.
Because building a new house is the perfect time to reassess how you want to live, and what you want to own and why, I’ve been gulping down books about organization and decluttering, and I’ve deaccessioned a fair number of items—bulky furniture, abandoned hobbies, clothes and books that needed new homes long ago. We gave away desks and chairs, a leaf blower, a lawn mower, crates of books, a giant wardrobe, and more. I thought I’d purged everything I didn’t need before leaving Denver, but when we arrived in Albuquerque, I realized there still was more to sell or give away.
Books on minimalism have a lot of appeal lately, but I’ll never be a straight-up minimalist, since I love books and textiles and music and my pets way too much. (And my pets aren’t clutter; they’re family.) In terms of getting all of my stuff under control, Marie Kondo’s book The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up was a useful place for me to start, although Kon-Mari’s devotees would probably look at my book collection and consider me a hopeless case. I also got some help from Margareta Magnusson’s wryly humorous The Gentle Art of Swedish Death-Cleaning, which is not morbid at all, but is really about joyously putting your affairs in order so you can get on with living your life. That book has been particularly useful because my current writing project deals humorously with the fraught nature of legacies and inheritance. Magnusson is a bleakly funny, occasionally scolding grandmother, and my favorite quotation from her book is this one: “I have death cleaned so many times for others, I’ll be damned if someone has to death clean for me.” Sadly, I can relate to that.
The brevity of life also appears as a theme in The New Minimalism: Decluttering and Design for Sustainable, Intentional Living (that’s quite a title!), which reminds us that possessions and obligations are marvelous things, but only the ones we choose intentionally because they bring meaning to our lives. It’s the Goldilocks theory or the principle of lagom: everyone needs to find the “right amount” (for them) to create a meaningful life.
I mostly find meaning in creating things, and at this point I’m finally settled enough that I’m working on a new novel, having swept away enough clutter to see my way forward.
*Not having any friends named Bob, I’ve been waiting for eons to use the phrase “As you know, Bob” in a sentence. So in that sense, our neighborhood bobcat has done me a favor.
