Crazy

I feel frantic. First we hatched this plan, now we seem paralyzed to implement it; there's just too much to do. Bitten by that gigantic bug called South Africa, we can't back out. Everyone we know knows we're going. And so the plans grow richer, but the immobility feels like a mushroom, the biggest organism on earth.

We have so much to get rid of, accumulated junk good for used book shops, garage sales, and "antique" stores. And that's the good stuff. Then there are cars, furniture, tiller we used one season.

We must sell the house, and in this economy. That means we paint, perform the most basic cosmetic surgery on the place we let get too saggy since its last operation. Almost everything is wrong with this 1938 bungalow. The least we can do is rake remaining leaves from our garden, pick them out of the pond, that best, most wonderful feature of our yard. It's our own little pan, a drinking hole not unlike those scattered across the wilds of Africa, where hundreds of birds in dozens of varieties come to drink, bathe, rest. 

I get the Tory Peterson guide and flip through the pages. We'll have to learn all new birds, all differently challenging, in ZA, but we're good at that. It's one of our hobbies, one of the many many things we do so well together. 

But as I'm browsing Peterson and thinking about nothing, really, Art comes in and takes a bunch of books off the shelf.  "As far as I'm concerned," he says, stacking them neatly on the floor, "we can get rid of these." 

I agree because I think we can get rid of all of them. I therefore keep this tiny revelation to myself: It's a small stack, six books out of hundreds, and they are all .... mine.