Sunday, December 29, 2019

I slept horribly last night, then fell asleep hard at dawn and bumbled through a funhouse of nasty dreams for the next two hours. So this morning I am groggy and unsettled, to say the least. Time seems to be prodding me with forks . . . an end-of-decade alert, perhaps.

Ten years ago, at the tail of 2009, I lived on 40 acres of old-growth forest in the middle of nowhere. I was 45 years old and had a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old at home. My dog was alive and my cat was unborn. I had just published Tracing Paradise. Here's what my blog looked like back then. I haven't brought myself to read it, but you can.

Now, a decade later, I am 55. My land is gone from me. My younger son graduates from college in a few months. My older son earns more money than his parents do. I read and write in a small house in a small city by the sea. In the intervening years I have published six more books. I have compiled at least two more unpublished poetry manuscripts and possibly an unpublished essay manuscript. In a few days I will meet with an archivist who wants to collect my papers. This is bizarre and unreal. How could I have produced all of those words?

Weirdly, I have accomplished, writing-wise, far more than I ever thought possible. Still, as expected, I remain unfamous and unstylish. My papers will get dusty in the archive, but, on the bright side, my kids won't have to clutter up their closets with my boxes of stuff.

Aging is a strange story.

2 comments:

Ruth said...

Ah, Tracing Paradise,, one of my favorites

Nancy said...

Aging is so strange. Sometimes I think that the six year old "me" in my memories is more "me" than the 30 or 40 or 50 year old. I look at all the twists and (perhaps) wrong turnings I've made and try to picture a different past, with some of the ways made straight, but then realize I would rue the odd person and experience that would have been missed. I think of all the future that I will not see (can it be real that I will not know my grandchildren when they are my age? It is like that irrational certainty that my child knows all my memories, so I forget to actually share them).