The Others

As I fed 15-year-old printed financial statements into the paper shredder, I found myself feeling grateful that nothing lasts forever.

A little over five years ago, right on the cusp of the COVID pandemic, I took a couple of trips back to the house I grew up in. My parents were finally preparing to sell it and move out west, precipitated by the need for a place with fewer stairs and closer proximity to their kids.

This meant getting rid of stuff. A lot of stuff. Some of it had been mine. For reference, I was in my mid-forties and had moved away permanently straight after college. I just hadn’t gotten around to getting rid of a lot of things, before I left for college or afterward.

Some of it belonged to my brother, and the rest to my parents. It’s harder to live light when you live in the same place for 45 years, I suppose. My family also has a propensity to collect things. Not necessarily particularly valuable or expensive things, just things that we like. It’s not a hoarding situation, not quite, but the reason I was feeding 15-year-old printouts into the shredder was that the stacks of paper in my home office in Seattle had finally become untenable. I’m one of those people whose brain feels cluttered when my space feels cluttered, and unfortunately I’m also one of those people who accumulates clutter.

The thing that’s finally getting me to do something about it is that we’re going to be moving. Not sure when, and the house we’re moving to will actually be bigger, but just the thought of moving all this stuff is exhausting (and faintly embarrassing, especially after having spent time in communities where entire families live in houses the size of my bedroom). When I was helping my parents get rid of stuff in preparation for their move (the staff at the nearest dump wanted to know if we were doing a major home renovation, we were there so much) I found myself wishing I had Marie Kondo’s phone number.

Later, I was wishing for it for myself. Instead of “Does this spark joy?” my guiding question became, “Do I love this enough to pack it into a box and move it?”

Like a lot of Americans, I have too much stuff. More than I could ever need or use. Much of my current endeavor is getting some of this stuff to people who could use it, or to places where people can find it (Ebay, for example, or area thrift stores or Buy Nothing groups).

But some of it, like those 15-year-old financial statements, isn’t going anywhere but the bin. (Seattle composts shredded paper, by the way—but don’t go crazy with quantities.) What’s also going in there is stuff I wrote back then. Some of it’s interesting, especially if it got revised and reused later in something that actually got published. A lot of it, though…well, let’s just say that I no longer have any doubt that I’ve improved as a writer, though even now I’m not composing deathless prose (and I definitely wasn’t back then).

If, as a book I reviewed for Library Journal earlier this year proposes, all of our lives and everything that we do is merely the universe attempting to hasten toward equilibrium, then I’m glad that at least that the mountain of stuff I’m digging through is temporal in nature. I’m weirdly delighted to uncover patches of carpet that I haven’t seen in months if not years.

And I’m really, really glad that my separation paperwork from when I got laid off from Amazon.com in 2000 is going to be fertilizing someone’s flowerbed in the coming months.

I’ve never been satisfied marking the seasons by solstices and equinoxes. There’s nothing wrong with it—from an astronomical perspective, it’s entirely correct, and a reminder that the planet’s axial tilt is why we have seasons in the first place. But in terms of daily subjective lived experience, it’s just one marker.

Though I no longer live by it, the Wiccan Wheel of the Year maps rather nicely onto how the seasons show up where I live in the Pacific Northwest. Around the beginning of August (Lughnasadh, to give it the term Wicca swiped from the Gaelic, along with the other four cross-quarter days) I start noticing changes. The shift in balance between hours of daylight and darkness becomes noticeable. The maple trees have gone to seed and the leaves start turning. Squirrels and Steller’s jays increase their activity, caching seeds and nuts in whatever soil they can find (which sometimes includes my vegetable planters). Though the hottest days of the arc between June and September are still ahead, there’s a sense of age to the season, of everything drying out and getting tired. Literally; when I go backpacking during August, depending on the trail water may be difficult to find. At the same time, seasonal fruits show up at the neighborhood farmer’s markets in abundance.

By the time September rolls around, end-of-summer and Labor Day weekend festivals proliferate. In America this timing is governed by the beginning of the school year as much as anything; as someone who used to live by the academic calendar myself, I have a lingering awareness of this. But it adds to the sense of acceleration as the season turns, with the autumnal equinox now a mere few weeks away. Summer went by so fast.

A few evenings ago in the middle of something or other, I paused. Through the open windows from outside came the sound of the first migrating waterfowl of the season. Geese and ducks don’t know when the equinox is, but they know when it’s time to go.

The Wheel happens to line up nicely where I live now; Samhain feels like the start of winter to me, and Imbolc feels like the start of spring. But this is really just a happy coincidence. The markers of the seasons’ turn here are what they are, and the successive peoples who’ve lived here over the centuries—especially those who were here for millennia before European-descended colonists showed up—have had their own ways of observing them. In other places, it’s different. When I was in the Kalahari Desert last fall, the people there paid far less attention to the relationship between planetary tilt and solar alignment; there’s far less variation. But they had a fine appreciation for shifts in weather patterns, and especially seasonal cycles of drought and rain.

Noticing these local manifestations of seasonal change helps me connect to the place that I’m living in. I’ve lived so much of my life in front of a screen, as so many of us do, that any reminder that what’s on the screen is a facsimile of the physical reality I’m living in feels meaningful. I’ve yet to see an AI-generated image as fascinating to me as the veins and curls of a browning maple leaf, and I don’t think I want to. The image is constantly reminding me that it’s only an image, while the leaf is constantly reminding me of the expanse of space and time, far beyond what my human perception will ever be able to encompass. I welcome that enormity.

Fall always makes me a little sad. I welcome that, too.