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- I am done moving, gone from that apartment, that house, all except for my dahlias and huge planter. Finished Thursday. Took the day off to finish moving, which was a very good thing because I stayed up way too late on Wednesday night having a crying jag. I was over at the house on Tuesday night packing, cleaning the nearly empty rooms, and a very big windstorm came through, the forward march of a cold front. A branch from the fir tree bounced off the roof. Suddenly, the lights went out. It was pitch black. No streetlights, no nothing. A minute later the puppy's roommate came upstairs with a lantern to save me. My phone ended up being in the pocket of my raincoat at the bottom of the stairs. I never would have found it. The fir branch bounced off the roof, careened down to the yard, broke through one of the remaining old clotheslines. Thursday wasn't rainy, the first day in a while, and I put some things out on the curb with a free sign. Some things were taken, some things weren't. The remaining things were loaded into the back of my car. Ran in the rain yesterday, got soaked. Came home and my dog had eaten half a loaf of chocolate zucchini bread AGAIN, so I had to make him barf it up AGAIN. This time, he barfed twice in the house. Slept in today until 9. Unpacked some things. It was going to snow this morning, but didn't, here. Went for a run just now, spitting rain, overcast, pensive Octobery weather. Ran to the old cemetery in town, walked along the fence (no dogs allowed). Looked at old headstones. Been thinking about history, the people who came to this town when it was new, who built their houses and these streets and left this town to us. Newcomers, which I was when I came here, have no roots here and don't know the history of the place yet - the mill, the railroads, the owners of one of the first automobiles in town ended up dying in their automobile when it was hit by a train, windows iced over, the driver partially deaf. A brewery and some early mansions were displaced by the freeway, some dismantled and moved, some torn down, some burned. The extravagant and disgusting wealth of robber barons is now viewed with what, nostalgia? Bricks, alleyways, progress. Time marches on, people come and go, the day ends and a new one begins. I do not do well with death, it seems. I am either way too distraught, or I am impervious. I didn't cry when my grandma died - she was 98 and had had a stroke a year before, what did we think would happen? And she'd been so independent her whole life, raising the rest of her kids and keeping her own house after her husband died when she was in her 40s. She'd done everything for herself and then suddenly couldn't get out of bed by herself. What kind of life was that? I can cry if I think about her life, but I didn't cry because of her death.
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