More de-cluttering

This morning I started to sort through my old slides and photographs... boxes of them, some now thrown away, some kept because they capture something special about the past: my trips to Venice in 1978 and 1981, my trips to Greece in 1976 and 1977, the Highlands of Scotland, and, of course, much of the Surrey countryside. Now that we are taking everything digital so much for granted, it is strange to see the old slide films glowing still richly with colour.


And I have hundreds of black and white negatives which will eventually need scanning in order to make sense of them; a project I will save for when they arrive in the USA next year.


Now I am about to take down my painting wall: I have used a vertical wall as painting base for years, preferring its scope to that of my easel. Later the studio will look bare and strange... but there lies the ending of one chapter and the beginning of another.


Nicholas






I don't always read what Nicholas writes before I compose my half of the blog, mostly because I take great pleasure in seeing the manner in which our thoughts draw near to one another each day. Today, however, I have. 


His photograph was taken when we visited Burlington, Vermont a number of years ago. Lake Champlain was frozen, it was grey and damp and cold...and we loved it. Shortly afterwards, we were exploring the option of moving there, a university town, liberal, beautiful, not too far from loved ones. We went so far as to invite Mom and Dad on a return trip in October of 2010, and they made plans to join us. It was during the summer before, that Mom had a medical exam and a secondary breast cancer tumour was found in her lung. She had radiation for the tumour and it has, thankfully, been successful! 


We cancelled our plans to journey together to Vermont and made plans to go to Rochester to visit them. Mom, being Mom, told all of this to a friend at Oasis, the adult education centre in Rochester where she and Daddy both teach and study. This friend had lived in Europe, in Manhattan, in Vermont and Ithaca...yes, fancy that? And she said something to the effect of, "They should have a look at Ithaca, it was my favourite. All the benefits of cosmopolitan living in a small, beautiful city."


So we did. 


On our first trip to Ithaca, the weather was abysmal, horizontal sheets of rain and grey clouds that never lifted. And...we loved it! We have been back twice, once in April of 2011 and again in October of 2011. The weather, it must be said, was always variable at best. We have seen our future home with lots of rain, some beautiful sunshine and lots in-between. And, we loved it. We know, as we always have, that this is the right time and the right place for our next unfolding.




It is good for me to remember at times like this that so many things happen for reasons beyond our ability to comprehend them. The wisdom is in reflection...


Judy