10 Minutes Down and 10 Minutes Up.....for Loren......

I set the Timer for 10 minutes.
With diligence I grab the Red Folder marked Hanukah 2014 as well as the tiles made So Long Ago  Without knowing it I leave behind the flat butterfly Hanukiah I made this year....I guess I was distracted...by the mess in the basement...
But I did find some candles...and I used this Hanukiah with its shallow places for the candles..and it did its subtle work of holding candles of light up until the last night..when they cast realms of light into the darkness and beyond..
I also take the kippah with wax inside from the candles and I head downstairs. I quickly empty the two Hanukah boxes and put everything into a third. Well, not everything. Papers and misc. crunched up stuff goes into the wastebasket.
Oh and Yes, everything Does Have a Story.
Stories, Musings emerge from the simplest things down there in the wasteland of the basement.
I reflect briefly on the Hebrew Letter for Story which begins with a Samech.

So here is the brief back story on the Waste Basket that I fill again and again. Black plastic bags get filled a lot in the basement.
 The wastebasket comes from the classroom of  my favorite and everyone's favorite Humanities at West High School. Miss Westby. She was a small woman with reddish hair. Her demands on us were phenomenal. If we had texted back then, it would have been OMG or WOW.
I can still see her standing there with fierce determination as we made our way through Machiavelli and Plato. She pulled some fine writing out of me, particularly my poem about Machiavelli when I alluded to the bad politics. of the time....the travail of Viet Nam...and I recall how we all marched..
and how change came slowly..and I remember Miss Westby dearly. She was beloved for all that she did for us...and my brother retrieved this waste basket from her room just before the school was pulled down and demolished...
that was a long time ago
and here I am now.
Hanukah box is now one box with a newish lid that almost fits....and marked on the outside so I know where it is...One of my favorite parts of the Hanukah story is the part about cleaning the temple..hmm didn't see anything about cleaning a basement...but hey!! same difference!!
hahaha

I move onto a shoe box and nearby miscellaneous art.
Here are the pieces I find:
2 Drawings from the 2010 conference I went to on Society for the Arts and Health that was held here in 2010.
a Drawing a local writer I know
2 Drawings from a May Day meeting.
A series of funny cartoons
One of a teacher at the end of the school year, trying to get her nerve ends to meet.
Another of a teacher relaxing by the beach of summer.
And yet one more cartoon of The Queen of Doing Things at The Last Minute.
....speaking of the beach I found a quick watercolor done at the beach called
"25 minutes in the Heat at the Beach."
Dated 2012, it was the summer my Father died...so I must have had a few moments to run to the beach and then back to Caregiving...and watching over him.
I recall another painting done of me in the water for my first swim and him reading on the shore...
(NOTE: I will add in the actual images soon)

In the shoebox I find an old photo of May Day...yep was quite a while ago judging by the format of the photo and the trees which tell the age of the place. The Sun Canoes are just coming close to shore and I am sure Loren Kellen is on one of them, leading the way.
He's been gone 6 years now and  he is dearly missed....He was a collector of things and stuff...and my oh the wake we had for him in the kitchen for days and it raining outside without stop....tears falling from the sky..a big passing...and oh the stuff he had  my oh my people had quite a time going through his house of stuff..  In the course of time...I received an owl of his....a metal owl..that blinks at me from the top of the stairs..near my island stuff..calling out Who?? What?? When??
and as I sort through the stuff I come across my brother's drawing of an owl.
Perhaps this is wisdom to deal with my Incorrigible Mounds of stuff now and not leave it to other people when I am gone...What a motivator.....

and so I look upon my Stuff with a different perspective as I think of Loren...

What if I am gone...suddenly perhaps...????Will there just be a dumpster outside? and all this Precious stuff thrown out willy nilly.????
what remains????.
I look upon this Stuff with precious eyes. Retrieving the HOBT magnet,.... the artwork of plants done out in wisconsin, a lovely landscape of trees in autumn and more
so much more.

I am here, in this moment, retrieving and sorting and remembering..

the timer goes off.
Done for now.

Mystery and Mess

Getting down to the basement is about 90% procrastination and about 10% actual work.

Even a brief descent though yields a treasure.

The other day I went down oh so briefly with my brother, I  just moved some of his

paintings around. The one that remained in front of the pile was the one that hung for years in the

back hall at our family home.

It is a wonderful painting he did of a living room of a place he knew well. He used to  care for some

elderly Greek people on the next block. It is a poignant colorful painting of their living room. The

 red carpet, small TV, table, brown upholstered chair show the feeling of the room The walls are

painted light blue.

There is a bookcase in the corner.  One can feel the presence of those who sat in the chair and

walked up the stairs on the left of the painting. It is a beautiful painting. Lonely, poignant and

evocative..and now it is upstairs,out of the basement...Another treasure....revealed and rescued....

Mi Suenos:Pink Bath Soap of forgetfulness

Mi Suenos
The Pink Bath Soap of Forgetfulness....Remembering Mexico

     No graphic images of the basement have been posted. It is too overwhelming, but I should be brave and take a few.

    Focus and Concentration: Organizing my brother's many paintings and drawings down there.

    So, once again I descend. The area that I am focusing on has old checkbooks from my parents   (need to shred) I see their handwriting....increasingly wobbly on the old checks...and the uncertainty that accompainied those last years...I toss the two baskets aside. They wobble like the past wobbles....almost toppling over..  And the old bathroom stuff, a douche bag, various sundries...easy to toss. I am trying so hard to make this area just for my brother, but first there is so much to let go of...The two crummy rugs will be hauled upstairs..one to the Vine Hut to keep out snow.....the other...really to the trash...
   
   All the old useless stuff we accumulate... and there amidst the cracked tubs I find a lovely round bottle of Pink Liquid Bath Soap...still sweet, still usable. I place it on the stairs to take up later.

     and if I am going to line up my brothers paintings on the old wooden stereo...really now..do we need to keep That?? I need to move and let go of the old paintings of mine.
$100 a piece anyone??
Oh the past..and how I did capture the dark mood of leaves in autumn outside my parents dining room window...and that drawing from long ago....and there amidst the memories a painitng done of the Hotel Pombo... a place I stayed in long ago.
I'd forgotten it was down here.
there it is . The sunny roof tops, the red pots full of geraniums the green courtyard at the top. I hardly needed to go down into the streets to paint and sketch and muse...it was all there before me...near the room I stayed in that I filled in up with the scent of white flowers and Oaxacan chocalate.
The journey there sustained me for 14 years. I painted la vendadoras..the proud women vending watermelons, chalmomile and even turkeys on the street. The mysterious overflowing markets of pots and finally the internal introverted courtyards of mystery...all there before me...including the charming woman in red I met on the street on her way to see her son.

all that

mystery and beauty filled me...I sketched and took photos as politely as I could..

and then returned home to Minnesota.

All winter in that small dark aparment I found my focus and painted the mujeres, the markets and the courtyards... and so it went for years..

my sunny intorverted life remembering and remembering 

as my husband read nearby

encouraging me.

Go and paint he said

and I did

leaning over my rough paper and paints far into the night.

the trip should never have happened. 

I had no money.

earlier that year I had been told I was 2 hours short on paper to receive Health Benefits.
I knew that was wrong, but struggled through the year.

and by chance my ticket was picked at a fundraiser at work..

and thus $500 mysterious dollars  for a Travel certificate wafted my way and I went off to Mexico 

for weeks.

the mess in the basement fades.

I fill the bath with the sweet pink soap

and get in.

drifting in my dreams of Mexico

remembering  Mi Suenos.

Second Descent: Persephone's finds another puppet show

A LITTLE SUMMER STORY: puppet show found in basement.

Another puppet show.  IMAGE TO FOLLOW
      Back down to the basement. Moving stuff around. The Task is overwhelming to say the least.
      I find a nice batch of Shtetl puppets on a stick from a class I found a long time ago and tucked into all that is a plastic bag with a former address almost faded out...address from a while ago.....but the themes remain.. that of the seasons.

    It's a funny little puppet show that I based on a little brown bag I found with a clear plastic window. Originally I held the bad and stuck the puppet pieces in.
 ......the images....boots....cold...snow..more snow...hats...scarf....more snow...cold....and then sultry summer images of heat...summer..swimming..sweating...svitzing...yiddish word for sweating...( Remember as Leo Rosten said: "Yiddish has more vitamins than other languages!!" One of my dad Jim's favorite quotes...somehow so much of what I am doing in the basement leads back to him..more than to my mother..although she figures into it all as well...
He was a raconteur, a conversationalist, Always the Star of the party as he hit the Anvil of Conversation again and again and made Sparks Fly!!! Always a Texan, always an intellectual, always the son of a poor farmer who got the call to preach, 

   And the name of the puppet show is; A Little Summer Story. I originally told the story from the point of view of Hot Summer...but having found this show which is undated I tell it from the point of view of Winter and then remembering Summer. It is small, it is cute and it is suited for an audience of about 2 or 3 people. I "performed" it this past sunday for an audience of about 3 people. That was just about right.

Persephone's descent into the fog under persistent gray skies.

Up until today when winter suddenly returned...overnight in fact. we awoke to white yards and slush...yes....up until then.....we had been lost in misty fog..

Familiar landmarks became fuzzy and the distance was obscured.

I have not made it down to delve into the basement...perhaps lost in the fog on the 3rd or 4th step down...as grey days press in..remembering a long ago time in England and Ireland... where gray skies are the norm....

My descent into the basement is focused on my brothers art, my fathers books and all the ambivalent acutremain a basement can collect...

If I go up another flight I am back in the world of my Island life...from the years 1975 to 1979.. 

Despite the many gray days I lived through there, the experience comes clearly into view now...some 35 years later...
I recall the old stone cottage I lived in..the stone walls, the silence, the wind, the wizened islanders who knew so much about the wind and the sea...and I recall the pressing in of the gossip....wisdom and wind, sea tides and seaweed...a dog I once had...cats I fed...uncertainties I felt..belts I wove..friends I made and all it surrounded by solitude and gray skies...yes with these persistent gray skies I remember it all..

so there are pulls in two directions...upwards to recall my island life and down once again..down into the underworld of my basement that begs to be sorted out by spring..

Sunshine is promised for tomorrow. 

8th musing Persephone clears a space in the underworld

8th musing....Persephone clears a space in the underworld.

Down in the underworld of my basement I always start by feeling overwhelmed. It is such a mess..and the air is stale...we had a lot of water down there last summer..but now it is dry..and stale....
I look around. Parts of the past are piled topsy turvy...and then I start moving things..sometimes just piling in other parts of the basement..but slowly as pieces are moved..
a space clears.d

I stacked my brothers paintings in a row.
I placed his drawings in a special box.

I threw out old stuff from the bathroom from my parents house.

I kept sorting and then....finding that  there are always treasures.....

if only to find the drawing of my parents with their old friend.

if only to find the photograph of my mother looking very young and wistful

if only to find some really usable file folders

if only to find my bearings and keep on working 

and to see very distantly in my minds eye.

an ordered basement.

******
    I take the garbage bags out.
In the silent withdrawn alley light glints off ice.
Frozen plants in the garden are still and ghostly.

High above, the clouds drift, as the moon continues to wane.

Persephone's Inner Vision      Seventh Musing
 December 8, 2014

Messy basements are Easy to Avoid....and alas that is what happened to me. Busy with being in holiday sales, busy with work, busy with going to the Conservatory to paint real vibrant Beauty with a friend. Busy sorting through my Emotional Caregiving Archive on the second floor. Busy Basically Avoiding the Basement. Of course. 
    But I still think about it a lot and how I would Like It To Be. I would hope to match the outer stuff with my inner vision of a perfectly ordered Basement...with Stuff Thrown Out and places and spaces for what I need.
     I have the archive of many of my brothers beautiful paintings down there. I envision with my inner eye....his paintings nicely stacked up and even accessible for someone to brouse through if they went down there. I envision his drawings all nicely organized in brown folders. I envision a lot fewer paintings of his down there all together, because people saw his work, were able to see his work and bought it. 
But it's hard to appreciate art in the midst of chaos.....so the musings continue..the inner visioning remains..and soon I will make my descent again..into the past and into the present demand of dealing with all of it....like a shrewd mermaid perched on a rock with a big feather sticking out of my hat, I look out at the horizon of possibilities and see what it holds.

Carrying In: 6th musing

   

    
          Later in the evening, after dusk has fallen and night is here, I search for a small sketchbook I had scanned earlier in the day. The one with drawings of Dad in the hospital in 2007. In that small space I captured it all, him in his hospital gown, weary and cantakerous. Him reciting poetry, the angels of mercy hovering about him and my mother as we waited...as I was used to waiting back in those days...and a fiery outburst of his that I recorded when he yelled and was not a good patient at all. He hated to be confined.
It's all there, but the sketchbook was not in the bag of books of his that I had also scanned earlier in the day.

    So I leaned into the back seat of the car and carried in that rumpled brown paper bag of books, well thumbed through, notated, some covers falling off or held on with a bit of tape....stuffed with papers.
I crossed the snowy yard and felt his presence long ago coming in the back door from a stint at the
Q yard railroad where he worked....carrying in a brown paper bag full of books, his thermos of coffee or something stronger and carbon copies of things he had typed. Tired, he would lurch into the room about 10:30 at night. I still remember the smell of the rail yard about him. I recall how tired, very tired he was as he got up early the next day to teach English classes at MCAD...tired, he poured himself a drink.
    My mother waited up for him. Sometimes they visited, sometimes they shouted and quarreled right away. Sometimes she was asleep, sometimes she was depressed. Other times their friend Viv would be over..the smell of her cigarettes permeating the house and Dad would revive and carry on a conversation long into the night.....with her and my mother.

    And so it went for years...Dad coming in with his trove of books in a bag..carrying in his thoughts, his quips, his overflowing ideas....
    And then it all ended, he retired from the railroad with a good pension and his contract at the Art School was not renewed.....He had time and he typed and typed....papers filling the room, thoughts going here and there and books..more time to read and books filling up every square inch of the house
    Now those very books fill the basement, the back room and parts of my garage. With little effort I've managed to recreate the chaos and wonder of my parents house.
    Persephone looks around in that basement underworld of literary knowledge, art and papers...She takes a deep breath and starts making order all over again.
   

mishegoss 5th musing on descending to the basement

                                                                                                                                                        

Michegoss: Literally insanity, madness. 
definition from Leo Rosten's The Joy of Yiddish. One of my dad's favorite books

1) a wacky, irrational absurb belief
2) A state of affairs so silly or unreal that it defies explanation.
3) A piece of tomfoolery, clowning, "horsing around"

And so I find a definition, a yiddish word for the work that I am embarking on.

It fits.

It fits the piles, the feeling of insurmountable chaos. The books of Jim's that he loved so well and so deeply. It fits the old red schoolbooks of mine with my students names.... they are grown up and married...it fits the old phonograph records piled in a box... the financial outdated records..and in the midst of all that.....a dress I wore just about this time for a friend's wedding...decades ago as they stood in front of her parents fireplace......... now he looks down from his heavenly place and she mourns him as she struggles with a bad hip.
and all my brothers art piled up and miscellaneous boxes of Real Mischgoss, the random papers of a life that proliferate and pile up...
Mishegoss
I guess I am grateful that there is a word to describe all this somehow.

It will take time, insight and simple hard work to move the basement from mishegoss to order.

 My hands will need to not only be my physical hands...but my inner hands that can handle hard emotions and hands like a mystical hamsa that can see into what needs to be done.

I sit now at my laptop...typing in blue..musing... long winter lies ahead...a meloncholoy melody plays..and the task in the basement seems daunting...but armed with my mothers wisdom and the zeal to reveal and heal what and who my father was...yes..I think I can do it..
Yes I can conquer the mishegoss and find a way to make order and communicate the rich life my father led through reading as well as the rich life my mother gave me of finding reflection and journaling the inner life.....
and so I look ahead inwardly and outwardly to what the basement treasures will reveal...and I feel confident that I will find a way to conquer the mishegoss.....somehow.....

Descent into Memory: Book about the Alhambra

 

  I have not made it down to the basement to sort things out...except for one foray into the far corner, yes, where so many of Jim's books are on the shelves and more in boxes and everything every which way. Topsy turvy chaos, not unlike the way it always was in his  room.Perhaps that how the books like it..all in a pile..it was pretty much how he like it...the chaos and wonder of his room and his mind.

INSERT PHOTO HERE OF JIM AT HIS DESK IN HIS ROOM

     It's bitterly cold outside...dipped to minus here as I lay in bed under the covers last night. I looked through a book that had sifted up from the basement and into my hands. A book about the Alhambra bought so long ago when I traveled to Spain in 1969. After a romantic cruise for 5 days across the Atlantic on the SS Michelangelo we docked in Algeiercieras Spain. With Africa at our back we alighted at night. What other way is there to enter Spain but at night. I still recall the mood, the moment and the mystery of that moment.
      There at the dock was Jim's brother Dan who knew Spain like the back of his hand. He had been a missionary there for decades. There he was with his wife Frieda and 3 daughters to greet us. 'We traveled together for the next 6 weeks.
    The two brothes were so different. Like oil and water. My father so expansive, and incendiary. Dan so contained, focused and mild mannered and deeply perceptive. Each brilliant in their own way.
      Dan was our guide to mystery and enchantment and the next day we visited the Alhambra with him.

       Why do we always place our parents at such an undefinable older age?
     I looked in the front page of the book where my dad noted his birthday that we celebrated later in Denia Spain and he wrote 45 years old. I'm older now by year than him. So that would place my mother at age 48.
and so we romped through Spain. Me with my youthful romances..them with their reinvigorated passion at traveling together through an exotic land.

     The billetes from the Alhambra are folded at the back of the book. July 19 1969. 50 pesetas.
and one small crushed flattened red flower. A red flower from the Alhambra. 45 years ago.

       I press the flat red flower to my nose and inhale the scent of memory. Leaving the cold of Minnesota behind, I go back to the heat and mystery of that Spanish day so long ago. There we were wandering the tiled majesty and halls and fountains of The Alhambra....built centuries ago it was the apex of beauty and architecture.
      The colored photos in the book bring back each fountain spray, each expanse of infinite tiled beauty and each moment.

       The carved lions, the flowers and us. 8 Americans, 4 adults and 4 children wandering the mystery and the beauty.

I hold the book and allow dreams to enclose me. Frost glitters on the window forming patterns from an ancient citadel

I explored years ago. Gazing at the back cover I see the water lilies and  red pots of flowers surrounding a mystical pool of serene water. I float there now in my dreams.

    I leave to go to school, driving quickly to get there. Absentmindedly I turn on the radio. Beautiful guitar music fills the small space of my car. I turn it  up as far as it will go, as I head up Ford parkway.. I am carried away by the intensity and familiarity of this tune...and feel lost in the passion of the music..

The music ends and the announcer says.....this is "Dreams of the Alhambra" ...the synchronicity astounds me and I feel affirmed in these musings.........

2nd Descent a Puppet Show "A Little Summer Puppet Show."

SECOND DESCENT
TREASURE FOUND: A SEASONAL PUPPET SHOW!!           note: Images to follow

"A LITTLE SUMMER PUPPET SHOW!"

     Back down to the basement...moving stuff around....

Jim's books on the table.. there are so many more in other hidden bookshelves downstairs, out in the garage....and all my stuff...but somehow all this finding of puppet shows and those times I performed for 2 or 10 or 30 people leads back to him.
My Texas, Railroad Worker, Poet Dad.....who loved to tell stories and jokes and muse on the lives of those he met....and who memorized poems that he recited even when memory has left out the back door and Dementia had moved in.....

     and this task is also about my Jungian dreamer of a mother who taught me to journal and value the Inner Life
"Allow your Outer life to relax so You Can Focus on Your Inner Life... she said so wisely...and in reading her typed differentiation of the four functions..Thinking, Feeling, Intuition and Sensation..I can see that I am dealing with my difficult sensation function by cleaning..and making order....not sure that I will find the wholeness that Jung speaks of..but if I keep at it..I may have a clean basement eventually....

     I move stuff around..fill a garbage bag with junk and then reach for the old plastic bag with my former address fading out....

Reaching in, I find an old puppet show I made eons ago.....its so old and it is so apropo of this time..of last summer..of this cold weather now..of all that we suffer through and enjoy here in Minnesota...

The inspiration for this little show came from a little bag I found that had a clear plastic window in it.  Aha!! I thought!! It's a PUPPET SHOW IN A BAG!!!!  and so I quickly fashioned a puppet show based on summer and winter. I fashioned the small pieces quickly out of my ink pen and watercolors....puppet shows are easy and quik!! sometimes...aaargh cleaning a basement...very slow and arduous...

So anyway.. I fashioned the pieces and taped them on so I would stick the pieces down into the bag...and you see it through the clear window!! Voila!!


and thus I performed it...showing summer heat...cooling breezes...air conditioning....swimming and svitzing... ( the Yiddish word for sweating....as Leo Rosten says..." Yiddish has more Vitamins than other Languages!!!) and then moving to other images of winter....and so on..

I performed it in the moment to various friends...they laughed..I carried it around and then it was forgotten in the busyness of life...and it was forgotten...

only to be retrieved last week...
I changed the pieces around....and switched the order so that the " story" begins with winter and ends with summer....like some kind of Remembered Relief....its THIRTEEN degrees out as I write this..

and I performed it this past sunday for some friends.....4 to be exact..they looked and laughed..
and now it is on the end of my dining room table..I ll carry it around again and make people laugh...maybe the front desk dental clerk I just spoke to at the end of my block needs a laugh.. I stopped in there to chat and warm up before my walk around the block...her husband is in a lot of undiagnosed pain...maybe she needs a laugh...or the people I will see later today at work..maybe they need a laugh...PUPPET SHOW IN A BAG!!!
yeah...we can laugh because the weather is so unrelenting here and so hard to take

and we tend to live for summer...but maybe I am changing my attitude around and I am living for Hibernation and Writing and Musing and The True Life of Memoir as lived out through Cleaning My Basement and Handling All the Pieces of My Past, one by one and remembering and writing...Throwing out what needs to be thrown...keeping what needs to be kept...selling what needs to be sold...giving away what needs to be given away...and remembering..allowing this process to recount my life..allowing the deep muse of Persephone to guide me... deeper..deeper...into the mysterious land of my past as revealed in my basement.

                             
     and it does all lead back to my dad Jim...who wrote on his manual typewriter every day....he wrote out poems he loved....wrote up his daily musings  and then xeroxed numerous copies....and sent them far and wide...who modeled for me the importance of telling stories...whether at a party...or typed out manually and sent to friends ...yes from his heavenly realm I continue the DNA that is in me..to type out a daily story and to send it out far and wide..and to keep telling stories..whenever I can...even a simple tale of the seasons that uses a paper bag for a stage!! 

First descent: puppet shows, Jim's books and flamenco silks

   So, I set the timer for about 1 1/2 hours and go down the steps. There is the jumble and overwhelming chaos of it all. It would be easier to run back up the stairs. But I persevere. My task I decide is to take my dad's many books off the shelves and put the boxes of puppet shows back on the shelves.

    I would rather run back upstairs but I stay. I start moving the books, ....the books, all the books he loved so dearly....poetry, film criticism.....essays, Auden, Yeats and more. It really is like handling the richness of his mind. Each book stuffed with papers and written over on the inside and back cover. Each book bulges with his commentary and deep thoughts.

    I clear off the sturdy table and put the boxes on there. I fill the boxes carefully. Who would ever know whats in each box. I am not anal enough to label them all, just make this order, for this time.

   The shelves clear. 

THE PUPPET SHOWS in Boxes.

     I can hear the laughter, I can see the fast quick drawings, the pieces on sticks. Oh a puppet show and stage for a long ago admininstrator. Oh, the puppet show that I brought to my Jewish Conversion,..hahaha the Quik and easy way to becoming Jewish!! Oh,..what was I thinking...the puppet show called " The Inner Life of My Mid Forties" and therein I find the TREASURES. Amid the watercolors and sticks are 4 small silk paintings I had forgotten about!

    3 flamenco images and one of a fountain. I bring them upstairs and up one floor to my hoard of silk fabric!!! and within a few days they are all magnificently Framed and put on Etsy.

www.anitawhite.etsy.com    No bites, but the pieces are done!! Framed in red fiery silk, enough to withstand Any WindChill. and they now are all on a long rod in front of the air conditioner, the one that blew in cool air all summer to keep us from sweating.

Here they are. My Basement Treasures.

Ole!! Ole!! Ole!!

Persephones First Descent: Description of my basement

The Inspiration for this Blog comes from Greek Mythology. It is the story of how Persephone daughter of  Zeus and Demeter was abducted by Hades of the underworld. Mourning her loss, Demeter searched for her daughter and while she searched nothing grew. The gods negotiated Persephones return..on the condition that she had not eaten anything while in the underworld..Persephone had eaten a few pomegranate seeds, so as a result when she returns to the underworld we have the season of fall and winter. For me, I use the symbol of Persephone and the Underworld as a metaphor for my descent into my basement. There I find relics of my past and I attempt to make order, discard what I no longer need and hope to emerge with order, clarity and insight. It is really a memoir project, since so much of my past resides down there.


  Description of my Basement.
             Winter came in early this year here in Minnesota. Faced with snow and cold 2 weeks BEFORE thanksgiving I carried on as did everyone else, with a feeling of stoic dread. It's Here, Winter is here.... and with that comes a feeling of isolation and Hibernation. What to do?
I always have plenty of creative projects and of course paintings to finish from the end of summer when the Amaranth blazed fiery red in my garden. That's long gone and the dead stalks are laying on the ground.
     It would be easy to feel like a dead stalk too, but in winter something deeper stirs, even as the ice forms on the surface.
     So I walk around my house and glance into my basement with dread. Time hangs a bit heavy, no matter how industrious one is and with the dark evenings coming in...what is there to do. I wonder half heartedly to myself....hmmm can I, will I tackle the basement....its menacing chaos lurks there at the bottom of the stairs as the cats scamper up and down on their way to eat or use the litter box. There was water in the basement this summer, although its perfectly dry now, but odd smells linger.

     I stand at the top of the stairs. It is dark out, about 9 degrees above zero and like Persephone descending to her underworld I go down the basement stairs, determined that when the green leaves are on the trees and when the  flowers grow and when Persephone once again dances in the upper world of greenery and growth. My basement will be clean and orderly....ready to retreat to as needed on hot summer days.
   And thus I decided to treat the CLEANING OF MY BASEMENT as a form of memoir, for my whole life....kinda sorta is down there, ready to be revealed, organized or tossed out. 

DESCRIPTION OF MY BASEMENT
     It's a mess. Long a repository of my whole life stretching back in time, it has become the collection point for my junk, puppet shows, my dearly departed Dad's library, more junk, old records, tax receipts that I have not figured out what to do with, old rugs, art, framing supplies, a real nice old table, washer and non functioning dryer, cat litter boxes, bits of wood, photos, trash, piled up picnic baskets, old tables, school records, more books of my dad's, photo albums of my past, the past clustered in corners, and most of all the years all piled up in the form of stuff and junk. Tall metal shelves hold a lot of the stuff, once upon a time it was kind of orderly, but time passed and I just tossed stuff down there.
I could say more. There are boxes of holiday cards and birthday cards, layers and posters of Heart of the Beast puppet shows, moldy cardboard boxes, files of drawings from our place in Wisconsin, photos of my students who are now all grown up and married. The past, the past, the past.....all piled up. 
   I am overwhelmed by it all, so I just run down and clean the litter box as needed and run back upstairs to the safe routines of my creative life and practical life.... I avoid the basement....
    Oh yeah, there's also a root cellar filled with semi useful glass vases that could hold enough flowers to make me forget winter...there are pots I have cooked in and pots I have not.
All the stuff of a life time and I am alive to be here, to have hoarded it and not used it or used it
and I am alive to have the courage to go down and deal with it .
    What helps me now is to frame it in the form of a memoir.  It often does not feel like it
 even merits the glorious title of MEMOIR...more like hoarded junk and stuff...but I look deeper and there are treasures.  I have had several journeys down to the basement and each time I have felt overwhelmed and exhausted....and yet each time I have found treasures, unbelievable treasures. Each descent of mine, each symbolic descent of Persephone brings a little more order, several garbage bags filled without a thought looking back and treasure upon treasure upon treasure. The past reveals itself.
    Yes, I am alive and I can deal with it..slowly. I set the timer on the stove and I descend into the mysterious realm of my basement....to clean, to sort, to file, to throw. It looks like it's going to be a LONG Winter. I think I'll get it done.

                                              
     I dedicate these first writings and musings to the memory of Brian who died yesterday. He was a vibrant soul who took deep risks in this life. A wonderful fiery, creative guy. Sometimes impossible, always ready to party. A guy who got off his death bed, dragged his morphine drip and catheter bag outside and  powercleaned one side of his house. He took closeup photos of open beautiful flowers. They are beautiful and they linger, reminding us to be open to the blossoming life has to offer us. His death was long expected, but my how chilly the world feels without him. May his memory be only for a blessing. Thank you Brian for all that you were. Now as you soar beyond these earthly realms I think of you, remembering we don't take a damn bit of all this stuff with us, so don't leave it as a burden for those left behind.
Rest well Brian, party down now into eternity. We miss you.