I’m moving out tonight on a whim. I’m moving to a place with two small basement windows and no bedroom door. There are pictures of lighthouses and that weird decorative fishnet hanging on the wall with weird little shells and starfish caught in it. No sunlight. No windows.
The walls of the room in which I’ve mostly lived up until now (barring Spain and wherever I happened to end up while at school) are a soft, light tan. Greens and creams and roses. Out my great big window are cornfields. So many of them. I’ve spent summers falling asleep to the hum of tractors and combines and the muted moos of calves. These huge windows face the west. My room catches the wind in the winter, making it the coldest room in the house. My bed shakes from the wind on many winter nights. My room catches the sun in the summer, making it the hottest room in the house. I get the most glorious sunsets.
The Back Mountain is right there. I can see the farm where my dad grew up from my window. I can see his uncle’s house past our fields. My uncle and aunt and cousins are right over the hill, at the bottom of the mountain, and their cousin, one of my childhood friends, lived right on the mountain. I can see that house from here, too.
I’m leaving much of my stuff (I certainly have a lot of that. Where did it all come from?) here. We have a three-shelf bookshelf (Thanks Lauren!), which is less space than I have here for both my and Chad’s books. I’m trying to be choosy, but it’s hard. The coffee table book about the Alhambra and Generalife made it. Most of my Neil Gaiman, The Feminine Mystique, The Feminist Mistake, most of my Donald Miller, Ulysses, my Spanish Isabel Allende (just Cuentos de Eva Luna; I don’t have the balls to attempt anything else yet), and others. All three of Julia Kasdorf’s books made the cut. They’re all signed. The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, signed when I met her (the first time? I don’t know if we’d met at a reunion or anything before that — that’s one of the problems of having A Mennonite Life) in her office in one of the lower levels of Burrowes before she moved to the first floor, Eve’s Striptease and Sleeping Preacher, signed after a reading in Foster the fall I was back from Spain.
I picked them up and put them down and started this blog. Maybe that’s why it’s named what it is. I couldn’t think of an appropriate header that I would probably not hate in a few months. Lisli. We’ll see.
My car is waiting to be filled with things.
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