The Life Chronological

I will note my absence from posting by letting you know that all these events happened exactly ten years ago this December. It’s a lot for me to take in, and realize, and write about! In the last entry I wrote about not knowing what had hit me, and this is true, but I was reacting to a sense of duty and didn’t have time to be dogmatic or even thoughtful about it.

Wallace Stegner, in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Angle of Repose, tells the story of a grandmother’s remarkable life as explained by her grown and physically impaired grandson. When I first read it while living in Latvia, everything resonated with me, and if you know the book, the reasons why are obvious. Stegner writes,

“My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making the new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents’ side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.”

This is exactly how I sold this lifestyle change to myself—that it was my generational and marital duty to pull up my skirts and get on with the business of moving forward.

The care that I took creating a home out of nothing in these Latvian flats was all to be left behind. The heart and work I put into building the Jaunmarupe house—designing my first kitchen, engineering the layout of gorgeous Villeroy & Boch tiles, standing over the guy with mortar and glass block making sure he built a shower wall exactly to my specifications, painting every single room myself, measuring and creating a design with the hundreds of balusters in the loft so little people wouldn’t slip through (although little Sissy did manage to get her head stuck during Thanksgiving dinner…), arranging our precious few belongings including our gorgeous antiques I’ve described within the walls built specifically to fit them—all to leave behind. Who can afford to believe in the “life existential” anyway.