Seasons

Joe posted a couple of nice pieces about seasons over on The Closet Professor.

And that got me thinking about my own experience of seasons right now. There is, of course, the autumn glory outside, fading now as leaves fall and those that linger change to rusty browns. It is a beautiful time in Wisconsin, as it is in New England where Joe has recently moved from Alabama. But I am aware of other changes in our life.

Tom and I are packing things away to move to Madison. Although the apartment where we will live is a nice size, as apartments go, and looks even larger because of high ceilings and large windows opening onto spacious views, we will actually have about half the living space we enjoy in the house on Berry. So packing up involves lots of getting rid of things. Today, for example, I have been selecting the dishes we will take with us and packing others up for St. Vincent de Paul. To give you an idea, Tom likes clear glass coffee mugs. I counted 24 of them this morning. This is in addition to ten other mugs. Clearly -- pun intended -- we will not have room for all of them.
 
Because for almost ten years we have been hosting family Christmas here, we have enough clear glass dishes for a dozen people -- plates, bowls and saucers. And we have two sets of dishes to provide for the needs of our kosher kids. And we have ... well, it is a lot to clear out and there is a small tug at letting go of the dishes I brought from my studio apartment in Chicago, the square plates I found at a thrift store to use when we have Asian food, the huge collection of Clay Art dinnerware with the jalapeño motif, something reserved for Mexican food especially when we had guests. As much fun as it has been to have all these, we will no longer have any place to store things we will only use once every few months. 

As I go through my own things, I find books that I have had since my university days, books I have not looked at in years although I took them from the dorm to the apartment I shared with Lee and two other guys the summer after I graduated; to  monasteries in Little Rock, San Antonio, Dallas, Washington, DC, Boston, St. Louis, Wisconsin, Chicago; to my studio apartment in Chicago and then to our apartment on Kimbark in Hyde Park and finally here to the Dells. These are so tattered that even St. Vincent de Paul would have no use for them, and like the trees in autumn with their leaves, it is time to let them go.

To everything, as Joe's quotation of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 reminds us, there is a season: a time to keep, and a time to throw away.

It is time. The right time.