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 Tales of a Tindominium #3 Least you think I have been suggesting that the transition from daydreaming about whether to live on an island to realization was a purely cerebral adventure enjoyed over glasses of wine, let me tell you about The Excavation.                       I had no idea that living in one house for thirty-three years would result in a pile of debris the size of a small mountain. I can’t fathom how we managed to fit all of the “stuff” we had accumulated into the house. Now we had to deal with it in order to sell our home, which meant we had to prepare for the realtor-mandated “staging.” Staging means you strip your house to its naked flesh, scantily dress it with a few enticing items from whatever precious decorating trend is in, and create an antiseptic setting where potential buyers can imagine themselves and their stuff living in ecstasy. You can thank HGTV for this obsessive marketing practice, where the line between reality and fantasy blurs for buyers and makes fanatics out of sellers.                         The volume of the stuff was bad enough, but the weight of it was something I had not been prepared for. I thought I was going to do a little digging through, throwing out, and then clean. Instead, Steve and I began peeling through layers of our lives. We had lived next door to my parents, who lived next door to my grandmother and uncle, and had cleaned out their houses after they passed away. Steve’s father had lived with us for a while after we cleaned out his house of forty years. So you can see how we ended up having some of their stuff.                       Our children had lots of stuff when they lived at home and during occasional rounds of the rotating door. Each had passions and interests, all of which require more stuff. When you love dance, music, and art, you have to read about them and display all sorts of reminders of the plays you saw, the performance you were in, the guitar you first played, right?                       Steve and I were no less guilty. We shared a passion for gardening and cooking. Do you know how many tools and toys there are for gardeners? For cooks? Our kitchen had his and her sinks so we could cook together and not get in each other’s way. We each had our favorite pots and pans. I collected cookbooks, many of which I still have been unable to part with.                       The garage and cellar had been off-limits to me by my own choice because the array of tools and gadgets that my husband had acquired, including the ones from his father, was enough to make me want to call the fire marshal.                       Then there was the writing stuff. The writing books. The writing, because you have to print what you write to see it as others will. The tools for writing. Who can live with less than a hundred pens in various colors? Or the rainbow of post-it poised for ideas to be scribbled upon.                       Have I mentioned music? We still had LP’s, on top of a tower of CD’s that threatened to avalanche without warning.                       The word “minimalist” was not in our family vocabulary. I told myself that the stuff surrounding us reflected our interests and zest for life. All true, but now we needed to get rid of the stuff.                       I had read Marie Kondo’s books about joy sparking you through the art of decluttering and others before them, not entirely unaware that the day of The Excavation loomed. Still, what I was unprepared for was the emotional evisceration I experience when faced with objects undeniably part of my family history. My mother’s wedding dress, my father’s formal Navy cap, and epaulettes, lace from my great-grandmother’s slip, postcards my own grandmother had sent me, and photos. Oh so many photos, some mysterious in their own right because I found myself asking over and over, who are these people? None of this stuff sparked joy, but it did trigger other emotions, including pride, sadness, and nostalgia. It was exhausting.                       My first strike had been to see if anyone wanted any of these items, but another lesson I was learning about stuff was everyone has their own and nobody wants yours. Yet it felt disrespectful, almost irreverent to be discarding family memorabilia.                       I tried remembering that getting rid of stuff didn’t mean I was discarding the memories evoked by it. Easier said than done.                       In the end, it was the pressure to get the house on the market during peak season and the parade of moving professionals crawling through our home that ended the paralysis. Donations to organizations who would pick up stuff with their trucks. My car headed to Savers without any prompting by me for a daily drop-off of more stuff. The Metal Man. The Stop Junk Truck. There is an entire industry devoted to getting rid of stuff.                       By the time our home went on the market, we no longer recognized it. Urged by our realtor to be prepared for a showing with little notice, we stopped cooking fish and garlic and shampooed our poor old golden retriever without mercy. We ate take out, packed on pounds, and didn’t know where anything we owned was. Well, not entirely.                       There were the inevitable storage units. Note the plural. One near the home we were selling and one with essential stuff we advanced to the Cape where we would be living six months a year. The excavation had not quite scraped us to the bone.                       We closed on the sale of our home at our kitchen counter one evening in December and were on a plane set to spend the winter in St. John the next morning. A suitcase with my stuff for paradise got lost and I arrived in St. John with the clothes on my back, a husband who had just learned surgery had been successful, and a lightness I hadn’t felt since I was a child. 

Tales of a Tindominium #2 Before the dreadful winter of 2015, which I fully lamented yesterday ( https://www.missdemeanors.com/single-post/2016/12/19/Tales-of-a-Tindominium  ), there was a wonderful season of daydreaming about how and where Steve and I might live if we were to let go. Let go of the beautiful house by the sea with its lush gardens and rooms filled with memories. Let go of lawn mowing, weeding, home repairs and replacements (We were no longer striving for “improvements”). Let go of real estate taxes, a mortgage, and a life that we had outgrown.            Just pondering questions like, “Do you think the medical care can possibly be that good in Ecuador?” or “Would we be bored in Belize?” were more fun than we’d been having for a while. While we knew we’d love to spend winters in St. John where we’d vacationed for thirty years, wouldn’t it be wise to explore other destinations?            We’d never been Florida people. The few times we went, we found it too crowded and busy for us, but reading about The Forgotten Coast made us reconsider. This stretch along the west coast of Florida was not part of the development madness the rest of the state experienced. Plenty of state parks and endless beaches prompted us to spend an October weekend there exploring.            The beauty of the Forgotten Coast is unexaggerated, but it’s chillier than we wanted in the winter. Plus, we tried a test we invented to determine whether a location would work for us: Pretend it has been raining for four straight days and your eyeballs hurt from reading. What would you want to do? We quickly came up with three ideas. A movie, a bookstore, or a fabulous recipe to cook. Unfortunately, the first two were difficult to find and the ingredients for our make-believe jambalaya impossible to hunt down. No, we were not meant to be Floridians.            The other question we deliberated, and we learned we really know how to deliberate, was where would we live during the summer months? I’d read a fascinating account about a couple our age who left New Jersey to relocate, not retire to mid-coast Maine. Notice, I’m not inclined to use the word “retirement” because I felt we were reassigning ourselves to new adventures, not popping into rocking chairs waiting to die.            I had a ton of wonderful writing friends who lived in Maine, many between Portland and Belfast. Real estate was reasonable and cultural stimulation plentiful. Maybe St. John in the winter and Maine in the summer? We spent Steve’s birthday weekend in April exploring the area. Steve, who was an Eagle Scout, knows how to explore. Inch by inch. In three days, I’d seen every small town I’d read about, visited bookstores and galleries, and had the best croissants this side of Paris (Moonbat in Belfast). I saw a wide variety of homes ranging from cabins to Victorians to farmhouses, teasing my imagination about what it might be like to join the folk who live Downeast.            In the end we were lured back to beaches, but this time to Outer Cape Cod, which had been our escape all the while we lived in Scituate. On a cold and dreary January Sunday morning, Steve might turn to me and ask if I’d like to take a drive to the Cape, walk the Audubon Sanctuary in Wellfleet where we used to camp, and then go for a bite to eat. The Cape had always managed to buoy my sagging spirits. Steve thought it might be the solution.            We happened upon a tiny Sear Roebuck bungalow in Truro. By now, I had become a member of the tiny house fan club, so the size didn’t bother me and it was near a similar bungalow we spent a week in each summer. One with a screen porch where I would utter, “I could live here.”  The house we were considering needed work, but I loved Truro. I could live there.            It wasn’t meant to be. While we were clearing out the debris from our home in Scituate (a blog post in itself, if not a book), we waited for certain zoning conditions to be met and were constantly disappointed. Finally, with a closing date on Scituate on the horizon, I realized we had no place in Massachusetts to come home to after our first winter in St. John. More importantly, no place to come home to if we needed medical care, which seemed likely since Steve had been given a scary diagnosis.            I panicked as I scrolled through the Outer Cape real estate listings, always starting with the lowest price, of course. Each time I would see the listing for a trailer in Wellfleet for sale for $25,000. There was even an article about it in Cape Cod Curbed, referencing $4 million dollar trailers in Malibu. (https://capecod.curbed.com/2015/8/24/9927554/wellfleet-mobile-home-for-sale).  Steve would laugh and say, “We could do worse, dear.” It was located next to what we believe is the most beautiful Audubon sanctuary in the country. I would bristle and tell him to get more serious.            He did. One day, as the closing date loomed and I was wailing about being homeless, Steve grabbed the car keys and said, “Let’s go look at that mobile home.”            We did. I sat on the dated old sofa on a November afternoon and saw light beaming into the tiny unit. Outside skyscraper tall pine trees, just like the ones we camped under at the Audubon Sanctuary, swayed and danced. My imagination went wild with ideas about what I might do with the challenging blank canvass I was looking at.            “I could do this,” Steve said to me. I knew it was an invitation.            “I think I can too,” I said, accepting, knowing people might think us crazy, but exhilarated by changes we were ready to embrace.            

  How I downsized my dwelling and grew my life. We all talk about it. We are the Baby Boomers. Watergate. Vietnam. Birth Control. Marijuana, Zero Population Growth, Organic. Lots more.            Here we are, children of the sixties, entering our final chapters on the planet. Who knew the day would ever come? And for so many, it passed prematurely.            For those of us still here, forging ahead as some of us like to think toward new adventures, we got to thinking, why do we have all of that stuff? What were we thinking? Where did it come from and more importantly, how can I get rid of it.            The winter of 2015 was the winter from hell. Steve and I had lived in Scituate, Massachusetts, since 1983. I had summered there my whole life. My great grandmother, Catherine, had purchased land on Kenneth Road when her daughter, my grandmother, gave birth to a premature infant who did not have the benefit of an incubator and suffered brain damage.  Catherine built a summer cottage on it, thinking the salt air would be good for her grandbaby. Nanna died in that house at the age of 106 and her baby lived in it until he was 85.            Steve and I had decided Scituate was a good place to raise kids, and it was. We purchased a house two doors down from Nanna. My parents had retired to a cottage in the middle. Our home was less than 200 feet from an ocean that could be gentle or insanely aggressive. The weather was savagely unpredictable. The satellite trucks from local media outlets often parked at the foot of our street poised for the latest coastal shots. We were fortunate never to be directly hit by waves, but we had a clear view of waves splashing over the seawall like geysers. We had quite an adventure and loved almost all of it, but we knew the ride was over.            That snowy frigid winter of 2015 found us huddled in front of the fireplace on our couch in the living room, stirring soup or chili in our kitchen, or buried under feather comforters in our bed. When we opened the front door, often there was an imprint of its panels embedded on four feet of snow. Our 14 year-old outdoor cat had to use a litter box because the snow was too deep to let her do her business. I could go on, but I’ll spare you.            We had been going to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands for nearly thirty years and you can be sure we didn’t skip 2015. Over the years, we had dreamed of retiring there. We had even put a deposit on a lot in 1987. Unfortunately it was a week before Black Monday.            But our conversations were a little more concrete this trip. No Virgin Island, my first mystery, was being published in August. Set in St. John, I had a contract to write a second. Our connection to St. John felt a little more permanent.            Using three rooms in a ten-room house began to feel ludicrous and wasteful. The gardens we had grown as a younger Steve and Michele now were becoming more of a burden than a joy, and anyone who has known the delight of a garden understands how disheartening that discovery might be. Property taxes were rising. Worse, FEMA threatened to make owning even modest coastal property financially inconceivable with new flood insurance rates.            The good news is that none of this made us feel old or finished. We just weren’t sure if we owned our house or our house owned us. And we wanted to sprout wings. To feel light and unencumbered. To try a new lifestyle. To simplify. To have new adventures. To explore.            We came home from St. John in May after a three-week visit to our favorite rental home where No Virgin Island had been conceived and set and committed to a radical change in our lives. We were giddy with excitement, not having a clue about what the future held.            We went from living in a ten-room Cape Cod by the sea to splitting out time between a cottage on St. John and a tindominium in Wellfleet. What’s a tindominium, you ask?            I’ll share more about that tomorrow.

 I found myself without power the other day, thanks to a winter windstorm with sixty-five miles per hour gusts. No power meant no Netflix, no Internet, and no way to recharge my laptop. Quel horreur. Then I reminded myself people managed without these things for centuries. So, I gathered my car keys, car charger, and phone and grabbed a book from my TBR pile. I headed for my car in the driveway. I plugged my phone into the car charger, turned on the heater, and streamed Christmas music on satellite radio. Settled in, I opened my book, a compendium of one hundred-one of the “greatest” ghost stories. I love ghost stories and read them year-round. But a comment in the preface gave me pause. The editor mentioned the Victorian tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas. I knew of ghost stories set at Christmas. A Christmas Carol has four. And I knew the master of the ghost story, M.R. James, regaled friends and students at Christmas with tales of the supernatural. I thought that was just him. But, apparently, back in the day it was “a thing.” Everybody did it. After the power returned, I plugged in my energy-depleted laptop and googled “Christmas ghosts.” Sure enough, I found articles on the Victorian tradition of “meeting round a fire of Christmas Eve” to “tell authentic anecdotes about specters.” “Nothing satisfied” more, according to Jerome K. Jerome (really his name) in his 1891 ghost story anthology, Told After Supper. A 2010 Deseret News article (the source of the Jerome quotes) points out a reference to the tradition in a modern Christmas song, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”, the lyric, “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.” (You’re singing that in your head now, aren’t you?) But why ghost stories at Christmas? Because, according to pagan tradition Yule boasts as many ghosts as Samhain. Yule is celebrated at the Winter Solstice, the longest day of the year and a symbol of death and rebirth. On this day spirits of the dead rise and gather with the living around the fireplace and Yule tree. The early Christian church chose to celebrate Christmas on December 25 to coincide with the pagan Yule festival. The Victorians borrowed from the pagans for their Christmas traditions—holly, mistletoe, Yule logs, and ghosts. So, if you’ve had your fill of reindeer and elves, round up some friends, find a hearth, serve up some egg nog, and scare each other with a ghost story or two. It’s tradition. This article from The Paris Review offers five ghost stories to get you started. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/12/19/ghosts-on-the-nog/

 While surfing the interweb—I mean, researching Christmas traditions—I stumbled onto some customs that are anything but merry. The anti-Christmas movement skews angry. Think t-shirts emblazoned with “F*** Christmas” and Facebook posts calling for the burning of Christmas trees. (PSA: Don’t do this. Christmas tree fires are fast and deadly. Videos by the National Fire Protection Association and Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Fire Engineering Program show Christmas tree fires progressing from a few smoldering branches to raging infernos in under a minute. In one WPI video, flashover occurred in 63 seconds. And the NFPA says Christmas tree fires have higher fatality rates than other house fires.) A variety of Christmas-themed slasher flicks pop up in my Netflix recommended movies feed. (Blame the algorithm.) Some of the anti-Christmas customs protest the commercialization and excessive consumerism of Christmas but others are mean-spirited to the point of hatefulness. They possess none of the charm of How the Grinch Stole Christmas or A Christmas Carol which are, after all, about finding Christmas. However, one custom that forgoes charm for terror and at first seems to be the epitome of anti-Christmas turns out to be a Christmas tradition with ancient origins—Krampus celebrations.  Krampus, a half-goat, half-demon creature, makes Bad Santa seem like your favorite uncle. Krampus travels with Saint Nicholas on the night of December 5th, the eve of Saint Nicholas Day. Children leave shoes on the doorstep and Saint Nicholas fills them with candy if they’ve been good. If the children have been bad, the saint will leave them coal or sticks. If the children have been “wicked,” Krampus will beat them with birch switches or kidnap them away to be tortured. No word on how bad you’d have to be to make it from Saint Nick’s naughty list to Krampus’s hit list.  Krampus originated centuries ago in the pagan religion of the area that’s now Austria and southern Germany. His name comes from the German word meaning “claw.” He’s believed to be the son of Hel, the goddess of the Norse underworld (He’d make a great villain in a Thor movie.) and to represent the frightening aspects of dark winters in pre-industrial, heavily wooded Alpine Europe. The Catholic Church banned his celebrations in the 12th century. In the 19th century, people sent Krampus cards. Yes, they’re as creepy as you imagine. (https://mentalfloss.com/article/88891/17-devilishly-awesome-vintage-krampus-cards). The Fascists banned him again in 1934 but later in the 20th century he staged a comeback. Now he’s jumped across the pond from Europe to the US where Krampus parties and parades take place coast to coast. The celebrations generally involve adults donning scary goat demon costumes, getting drunk, and behaving in an un-Christmaslike fashion so it’s probably best to leave the wee ones at home. They certainly won’t want to sit on Krampus’s knee.

 I’m not really a grinch. My occasional forays into humbug-land notwithstanding, I love Christmas. The season creates in me both a sense of nostalgia and hope for the future. I look back on the past with a conveniently fuzzy memory and long for the way things “used to be” while looking forward to the coming year with hope for the way things might  be. I also admit to indulging in my fair share of schmaltz and sentimentality. I’m streaming Christmas carols on Spotify as I type this. I break out the Lenox Christmas china and the Christmas-themed guest towels and ooh and aah over Facebook posts featuring puppies, kittens, and other small animals sporting bows and Santa hats. I also watch Christmas movies. At least, I used to. I’ve been disappointed recent holiday cinematic offerings. Too many “find a fiance by Christmas” flicks and too few “save the orphanage/feed the hungry, homeless man/save the neighborhood from a greedy developer/bring joy to my elderly, neglected neighbor” flicks. Of course, I can re-watch the classics. I own DVD copies of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” But I wanted something I hadn’t seen before that didn’t involve Christmas kisses, dates, or weddings. Netflix let me down. Not being one to give up hope—it’s Christmas, after all—I decided to search for some classic (translation: written before the 21st century) Christmas stories to read. Here’s a sample of what I found.  “The Little Match Girl.” Hans Christian Andersen’s story turns up on a lot of lists. (Yes, there are lists. I’m not the only one fallen victim to the nostalgia fairy.) I’ve read this one before and it’s a fine story but—spoiler alert—tragic tales of impoverished pre-teens who freeze to death alone at night out of doors are not quite what I had in mind for the festival season.  “The Gift of the Magi.” O. Henry’s tale of love and sacrifice fits the bill of Christmas classic but I’ve read it (I had very good high school English classes) so the twist at the end isn’t so much of a twist anymore. “A Christmas Carol.” Read Dickens’ classic, too. I actually prefer to listen to Patrick Stewart narrate it, which I did the other day.  “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” I’ve read Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, too, but it was so long ago I forgot “who done it.” This one goes on the reading list.  “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” One of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales. Lots of fairy tales, especially Andersen’s, show up on Christmas reading lists: “The Fir Tree,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” the aforementioned “Little Match Girl.” I love fairy tales, I grew up with them, even studied them in college. That’s when I realized how dark they are, especially the original, not-watered down versions. Better suited to Halloween reading lists.  “At Christmas Time” by Anton Chekov and “Papa Panov’s Special Christmas” by Leo Tolstoy. I knew Chekov and Tolstoy wrote capital-I important, college reading list works. I didn’t know they wrote Christmas stories. On the list.  “A Kidnapped Santa Claus.” Possibly dark. Santa’ kidnapped by demons. But I’m reading it because L. Frank Baum, the author of the Wizard of Oz books, wrote it. And because it sounds like it could be the plot of a Macauly Culkin movie.  “The Holy Night.” Swedish author Selma Lagerlof was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Cold-hearted man meets mysterious beings and learns the true meaning of Christmas. Yeah, I know, sounds kind of like “A Christmas Carol.” But I like “A Christmas Carol.” But “A Christmas Carol” is a holiday classic for a reason—we all want to believe faith and some holiday magic can turn mean spirits into open hearts.  Online Star Registry’s blog (https://osr.org/blog/tips-gifts/20-famous-christmas-stories/) and American Literature’s website (https://americanliterature.com/christmas) contain links to the stories I mentioned as well as several others. What are some new-to-you (or not-so-new but worth reading again) Christmas classics you want to try? 

 Every writer has different editing moments. There are the early edits, adding plot points or taking out backstory to keep things moving. Later in the process we continue to check the plot points but start to fine tune the dialogue, the action, the beginning and end of chapters, the punctuation. Then, finally, and for a moment it feels like a reward, the editing of the complete manuscript to turn in to the publisher. This is where what felt like victory turns to ‘I need a drink’. At least for me. Because it feels final (actually, it is final) I begin to re-question everything. Usually my Beta readers haul me back from the edge and I get back to the real work at hand. The final edits. Overwhelming in some ways. Check everything. That’s all. I think every writer has a list of what to do as part of the hedge against insanity. Plus, checking things off a list is universally satisfying. My list is along these lines: character arc (names consistent and are their emotions developing in a consistent path)chapter breaks/lengthfine tune the dialoguecheck description (accuracy, consistency, and things like time of day/length of day)eliminate my personal writing ticks (most writers have specific words they overuse and word search is helpful here)read the entire manuscript aloud in as close to one go as possible. The number of typos, trip-ups in dialogue and other problems uncovered by reading aloud is astounding.  Right now I’m getting close to this point. Actually I am already working through parts of this list, and it is exciting. I’m curious about other final edit check lists. What gets you across the finish line?