Tag Archives: moving

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, editing, Writing

Monday Musings: Nesting (Redux) and Writing

Back in early January, with snow falling on our bare trees and the brisk cold of a northeastern winter defining our days, I wrote a post for this blog about “Nesting.” The title referred to what Nancy and I had been doing around the house — unpacking, finding places for our stuff, making improvements to the new house.

That process has continued in the months since. While we have also done other stuff — editing, music, birding, and other pursuits on my part; weaving, knitting, and getting her last academic paper published on Nancy’s part — we (mostly Nancy) have still been working on the house. My hands are not (and never have been) steady enough to paint the trim around the interior of the house, so Nancy has carried the bulk of that burden. And with the onset of spring, my multi-talented spouse has also been planning her approach to landscaping our new yard. And I have done more unpacking and have been slowly hanging our art around the house.

I posted a couple of photos of the new place back in January, but wanted to follow up with a few more today.Interior of house Interior of houseInterior of new house. Front exterior of house. View of yard.

And I wanted to say a few things about this blog, which I seem to be struggling to keep up with consistently. I am trying. Truly. A lot of the time, though, I just don’t want to write. It really is as simple as that. Most days, I wake up, confront the newest atrocity committed by this hateful, cruel, criminally incompetent Administration, and am torn between wanting to write yet another outraged screed and wanting to ignore politics altogether. I don’t want this blog to become nothing more than a nonstop critique of all the current occupant of the White House is doing to undermine the strength of our republic. But I also don’t want to post about birds or baseball or our latest favorite series on Netflix when the country is burning down. And so I go for weeks without posting at all, which isn’t an answer either.

This is actually symptomatic of a larger problem. I’m not writing much of anything — not blog posts, and not fiction. I did some fiction writing early last year, when I was hired to write something in someone else’s world. But the truth is, I haven’t written a word of fiction that was really my own since we lost Alex back in October 2023. Will I write again? I hope so. That’s all I can say for certain. I want to write again. But I don’t want to write now, and I feel that I owe it to myself to take this time to continue healing. I have no idea how long this feeling will last. A month? A year? A decade? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. All I know is, I need to take care of myself.

Because I AM healing. I’m doing better in most ways than I was a year ago, and far better than I was a year and half ago, when the grief was fresh and I thought it would never ease.

Watching the house come together has been good for me. Watching spring touch our little slice of the Hudson Valley has been lovely. Trees are blooming. Flowerbeds are revealing themselves. We moved in late in November, so the arrival of warmer weather has been a revelation for us.

I saw Erin in March. I will see her again in May. And then June. And then maybe later in the summer. And then . . . soon after that. Being with her is a balm for both Nancy and me. And so is Nancy and my time together. The love tying our family together remains strong, and in many ways missing Alex, loving her, grieving her, has become one more unbreakable filament binding us to one another.

So we nest. We heal. We love. And we continue to ask your patience and support.

Have a wonderful week.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings (On Tuesday): Nesting!

No, this isn’t a post about birds (though I imagine one or three will be forthcoming before the year is out). As I have already mentioned in this blog, Nancy and I are living in a new place: a house in New York’s Hudson River Valley. We’re on six acres of lovely land, with fruit trees, a pond, open grass, and wooded sections. Nancy has plans for a wildflower meadow, a vegetable garden, and lots of flower beds.

Right now, though, it’s too cold for all of that, and our attention is elsewhere.

We are nesting.

This, at least is the word my parents used to describe that phase after a move when one primps and polishes and purchases things for one’s new home. And, as a birder, I like the term.

We have been painting the house, room by room, for a few weeks now. I will not go so far as to say that the people who inhabited the house before us had terrible taste in wall color. But, bless their hearts (I may have left the South, but it hasn’t entirely left me . . .), they did chose some odd hues for a few of the rooms. We saw the potential of the house right away, but we also knew that we needed to lighten it considerably. This meant having the floors refinished before we moved in. They are wide plank Yellow Pine, and they’re beautiful, but they had been stained dark. And it also meant painting those dark walls a neutral, off-white, and painting the dark red trim (yes, that’s right: Dark. Red. Trim.) a soft beige, about the color of creamed coffee.

Living Room
Our new living room. The window trim has yet to be painted, but the walls have!

The new floors and walls have transformed the house, which actually has lots of windows and SHOULD be nice and bright. It’s now getting there.

We are also buying stuff. Yes, before moving, we threw away a bunch of our belongings and it felt great. We were lightening our load, downsizing to fit our new, smaller home. And we don’t want to undo all of that hard work. But the fact is, we need some things. We don’t have built-in bookshelves here, so we need bookcases. We have a wonderful outside patio that will require a fire pit at some point. We left our TV and our old stereo for the new owners of the old house. We gave away three beds when we moved and need to replace two of them with sleeper sofas. And we had two incredible vacations last year, and I am eager to turn some of my prized photos into framed art — even though, as Nancy points out again and again, we already have too much stuff to cover our newly painted walls . . . .

Mostly, we are moving stuff around, figuring out where things go, where furniture and art and lighting will look best and do the most good. It’s fun. It is something we are enjoying doing together. And we are slowly turning our new house into a new home, a place in which we will be happy and comfortable for years to come.

Nesting. Feathering the nest. Like some overgrown bower birds looking for shiny, colorful new objects with which to adorn our new domain. That’s us right now. As I say, it’s a lot of fun. Which doesn’t mean we’re not looking forward to being done and fully moved in.

Have a wonderful week!!