Another pretty fall day with fast-moving, high clouds; another labyrinthine jarmarka (this one for electronics; I am thrilled to have finally bought a sewing machine); another late afternoon moment when the girls are refusing to eat their dinner and there's no hot water for their baths and I cannot summon the magnanimity that Alfie Kohn prescribes, and I just flop in a chair -- the chair I should say, the sole chair -- and give up.
Until our possessions arrive (they are said to be en route from Riga now), I'll continue to wrestle daily with a powerful, frustrated impulse to organize, to make a home here, to get shelves up and clothing stowed away and furniture in place, just so, making pockets of familiarity and beauty in this empty apartment, so that our life here might officially begin. I am nervous living without a platform, a launch pad, a base. I would have liked to claim, before this move, that my identity is not tied so closely to things, but that would have been wishful. I have a passion for scene-setting, and I constantly extrapolate plots, lives, characters, whole eras, from objects, even fragments and fonts, on and off the street. I am so over worrying about it, and about finding words for it that are weightier than décor, and about whether I ought to be a better feminist. I can't turn the impulse off. If I was in solitary confinement I'd spend a certain amount of time every day manipulating the cobwebs in my cell.
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