Peg Kerr's Journal

I noticed that my backup drive was continually failing to back up. After monkeying around with it for awhile, I took the drive and laptop into Best Buy, where they diagnosed the problem: I had waaaaaaaaay too many files on my computer.

Oh.

So I started culling files and music off the computer. It was both unnerving and satisfying, but I managed to kill several gigabytes worth of data, which meant I got the automatic backups going again.

Inspired by this, I attacked several other sources of clutter. I emptied several more boxes of legal files left in the garage by Rob (no, I'm still not done going through them). I took a box of hardback mysteries to Half-Price Books (only got $5.00 for them, but at least thirty more books are out of the house). I culled through my closet and took some bags of clothes to a thrift store (I took particular grim satisfaction in stuffing a sweater Kij had given me into the garbage bag. Why had I kept it so long? I have no idea).

I still have much too much stuff. But this week, at least, I beat it back. At least a little.

The design shows some of the things I cleared out this week. I overlaid those images with a scythe, both to indicate cutting things out of my life and as a veiled reference to the concept of Swedish Death Cleaning.

Lower center: A half-open laptop. Directly above: hanging files. Above that: stacks of books. Above that, stacks of clothes on shelves. Overlaid over all: a scythe.

Decluttering



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

I attended an ordination last weekend, and the pastor explained during the announcement portion of the services that out in the narthex, there was a table containing bags with sticks of chalk and a piece of paper explaining the tradition of doing a house blessing at Epiphany. We were all encouraged to take them home. I was intrigued, as I had never heard of this custom before, and I took home the bag with the chalk and read the paper.

It said:

For centuries, Christians have celebrated the season of Epiphany by chalking their outside front door with a blessing. You are invited to try it at your home.

The Traditional Chalk Blessing:

20 † C † M † B † 25

Surrounding the blessing is the date of the new year (2025). The crosses between the letters symbolize Christ.

CMB has two meanings. It signifies the traditional names of the three magi who visited Jesus (Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar), and it stands for the Latin phrase "Christus mansionem benedictat," meaning "May Christ bless this house."

Reading about this tradition got me thinking about my house.

Rob and I moved into this house in December 1992. I realized, counting back, that I am almost at the exact point where I have lived half my life in this house.

I thought of a song I've loved for years by one of my favorite artists, Peter Mayer, "Houses of Winter," which imagines homes as almost sentient entities, watching over the people in their keeping. ( The Houses of Winter )



When we moved into this house, I was seven months pregnant with Fiona (convenient, because I wasn't expected to lift anything heavier than a waste basket on moving day). I brought my babies home to this house and raised them here. Rob and I loved each other here, and it was my anchor when he died.

This home has sheltered a family. Now it is just me.

I have often wished I come up with a proper name for the house, as some of my friends have for their own homes, but nothing ever quite seemed to fit. Yet it has a personality. It was built in 1916 and has beautiful bones, but it is whimsical and sometimes temperamental, too. The furnace in the basement is original to the house, an octopus monstrosity that crouches in the darkness, tentacles reaching in all directions, hemmed in by asbestos, greedy as hell for natural gas, yet as reliable as could be desired. The electrical system is barely adequate. The floors slope toward the midline, the tile floor in the bathroom is cold, and the light switch in the bedroom says 'NO' instead of 'ON' because it was installed upside down. The less said about the paneling installed in the hallway and two of the bedrooms, the better.

The house regularly demands tribute in expensive repairs: a new roof. Drain tile in the basement. Regular repainting. The walls are threaded through with cracks in the plaster.

I have tried to make my home more my own as I have been slowly cleaning out Rob's stuff. I have never had a pet while living here (allergies make it impossible). It is just me. And the house.

I've eaten tomatoes and Swiss chard grown in the backyard and cooked thousands of meals in the kitchen. I've probably cried in just about every room in the house. The walls have soaked up so much laughter, the yells from so many fights, the joy of so many celebrations (perhaps that's why they are cracking so much).

It feels almost like...like it's the two of us now, the house and me. It is almost anthropomorphic, in other words, as in the Peter Mayer song. This house has watched over and sheltered my family, been my comfort and haven in times of struggle and grief. Now it watches over me. It seems more personal. Just as it has been a blessing to me, it seems only fitting to bless and thank the house in return.

Background: a dark wooden front door, overlaid at the top with a stitched sampler reading 'Bless This House." The top of the door has an inscription in white letters "20 † C † B † M † 25." Lower center: a mesh bag containing a piece of chalk hovers over three porcelain figurines of the three wise men. A pair of hands reaches up from the bottom, cupping the sampler in blessing.

Blessing



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I had a bit of trouble coming up with a topic for this week's collage, because what has preoccupied me the most for this particular week were two topics I'd done collages about before: the arthritis in my hand and my sleep disorder. Both have been extremely troublesome.

But I've done those subjects before, as I said, and frankly, they are pretty damned depressing topics. Good lord, I don't want to be a tiresome old lady who natters on boringly about details of her life that cannot possibly interest anyone else.

After the election, I wanted to do a collage about something hopeful.

Upon thinking about it further, I realized that I did have something hopeful to talk about specific to this week.

Every year, the week of Veteran's Day, my Dad's birthday, and Rob's birthday, I always plant an amaryllis bulb. I do this at this time of the year because if you time it this way, the bulb will usually flower right around Christmas.

Planting a bulb for Christmas does not cost very much at all. I usually buy a bulb at Ace Hardware every year for about $12, which includes the soil and the pot, but I always use the same red pot I got years ago and use only for this purpose. This year, I am simply re-planting the bulb I used last year as an experiment. I had put it in the basement in the dark for several weeks in preparation--we'll see if it works.

It is a Christmas ritual that is dependable, comforting, and cost-effective (which cannot be said of all Christmas traditions). And it is hopeful. I plant the bulb and can look forward to a huge, extravagant bloom.

I need some hope this year.

Edited to add: A friend just emailed to remind me of this song, Amaryllis by the Flash Girls.

I can't get the embed code, but you can listen to it here.

Background: fallen autumn leaves on concrete. Lower center: a red ceramic pot planted with an amaryllis bulb. Hovering over the pot: a semi-transparent red amaryllis flower in full bloom.

Amaryllis



Click on the links to see the 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Doing this a little early, as I will be at Mythcon this weekend.

My attempts to dismantle the brick-and-board bookcase in the bedroom and get rid of the books has commenced. I checked with several used book stores, and it seemed hardly worth the effort of hauling boxes of books to the store--they assured me that they would look through them, reject most of them (and then I would have to take the rejected books back home), and give me only pennies for my trouble.

I have a coworker who is extremely interested and will be coming over next week to look at the collection. I hope he will take many of them off my hands. This past weekend, however, I resorted to another strategy: I went book bombing.

The Little Free Library nonprofit was started just over the state line in Wisconsin. This was one of the first places the idea spread, and it is very well-established. Besides mine, there are close to thirty Little Free Libraries within my zip code. I knew very well that many of Rob's books are old and perhaps not too appealing for modern audiences. But perhaps a science fiction fan walking by a library might stop to check and be THRILLED to find an old classic science fiction book by Pohl Anderson or James Blish or Clifford Simak or Robert Heinlein. If I left just a few books in any library I stopped at, it wouldn't be too overwhelming for the steward.

So that is what I did last weekend: I loaded up my car with a box of books and stopped at dozens of libraries. It was fun! Most of them were variations on wooden boxes, but I was rather impressed with the one made from an old microwave oven. I did run across one neighborhood where there was a cluster of them, and the neighbors had together stenciled paint on concrete squares, placing them around as stepping stones amidst the flowers planted around the libraries.

(I do think, of course, that mine is the prettiest of them all.)



All this work managed to empty only one of nine shelves. It feels like emptying an ocean with a tablespoon. I REALLY hope my coworker will want a LOT of these books. But at least I have started.

Image description: Background: square painted concrete blocks stenciled with designs. Overlaid: nine Little Free Libraries.

Book Bombing



Click on the links to see the 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

I've been thinking about Minicon, which I attended last week. And I've been thinking about the concept of a palimpsest:

a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.

I have been going to Minicon for forty years (well, aside for the years when it wasn't held due to Covid). That means a lot of memories. Minicon has long been a joy and a delight, an event to which Rob and I looked forward every year. We brought our kids--Fiona went to her first Minicon when she was only ten days old. We always got a hotel room. Many years, we worked on the convention committee. Rob was the Head of Operations when Minicon was in its heyday, when Minicon attracted more than 3,000 people. I cut my writing teeth at Minicon. I made so many friends, so many personal and professional connections. It was a cherished family ritual.

Now, I am the only member of my family who still goes. And as much as I still love it, and as much as the familiar soothes and comforts, it is also painful. Going to Closing Ceremonies and not seeing Rob there is so, so painful.

I didn't go to Closing Ceremonies this year.

I wandered around the con and took pictures of all the signs hanging up. They put those signs in storage and pull them out again every year. The memories are the same, yet different. I see a sign, and I see the sign again in my memory, in all the different Minicons in my mind.

So I created the collage from the signs seen around the convention, and over them, I placed ghostly memory images of Rob and myself. Back when we were young, when Minicon was nothing but joy, a string of dazzling conversations and fascinating interactions. I still feel ghostly echoes of that joy, but it's not quite the same. Minicon is not the same.

I attend Minicon, and I see traces of all the previous Minicons.

I don't see Rob.

Image description: logo for Minicon 57 March 29-31 2024. The rest of the card is made up of tiled signs seen around the convention (Consuite, Bar, Art Show, Dealer's Room, Programming This Way, Opening Ceremonies, Minicon Volunteers). Semi-transparent black-and-white images of a young man on a telephone (Rob, working as the Head of Operations on the Bridge) and a smiling seated woman (Peg) hover over the signs.

Palimpsest



Click on the links to see the 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

When I came downstairs this morning, this was the picture that was on display in the digital frame that Fiona and Alona gave me for Christmas. Seeing it gave me a great deal of comfort, as if it were a sign that Rob was sending his love.



I was pretty pleased with my appearance. I think I polished up pretty well.





The wedding was in a lovely private club in Summit Avenue in St. Paul. Delia was Fiona’s attendant and in fact walked with her down the aisle.



I didn’t take very many pictures during the ceremony because I was using my phone to record the ceremony. Fiona and Alona wrote their own very moving vows. They incorporated a hand fasting braided cord (blue, green, and brown), and seven meditations on love from various writers. At the end, they both stomped on a cloth-covered glass and we all cried ‘Mazel Tov!’



There were hors d'oeuvres and cake and champagne, music and conversation and dancing. There was a lot of joy. Alona’s sister Mary and Delia gave moving speeches.

It was a wonderful day. I am delighted with my new daughter-in-law and overjoyed by this new addition to our family.





Edited to add: Check out the mood icon. For once, this line from Pride and Prejudice is absolutely perfect.

The last two years of this collage project, I have produced cards commemorating the Thanksgiving celebrations I've had with my family. The card for this week is, in a way, a Thanksgiving card, too, only it comes at the concept from a slightly different angle.

First of all, we received word on Wednesday that Fiona has been accepted into the St. Paul plumber's apprenticeship program. She has been working faithfully in her employer's warehouse since May, pulling plumbing fittings, throughout the 100-degree heat this summer. Had she not been picked (they only accept one candidate out of three) she would have had to wait a whole more year to apply again (unless she were to try her luck with a different city's union). Now she will get a raise and begin combining classes with her job. The program will take five years for her to finish. This is wonderful news and we are all absolutely overjoyed for her.

The other wonderful happening this past Wednesday is a longer story, but trust me, it's worth it.

Rob and I got married in 1986. We picked out our wedding rings on Valentine's Day of that year. My ring had a brilliant cut diamond of modest size, about a third of a carat. I loved my ring and wore it proudly.

About fifteen or twenty years into our marriage, I happened to look down at my hand while I was in the shower, only to find that the diamond in the ring was missing. My heart plummeted. I shut off the water immediately and searched the tub, but I feared that the stone had washed down the drain. Anyway, the diamond was gone.

Now as it happened, Rob and I had been going through a rough patch. We were really strapped for money. But I didn't hesitate a moment. I had all the information on the stone and went back to the jeweler. They said that the ring was insured and for a nominal deductible, I could get the diamond replaced. So I did, getting another brilliant cut diamond of a similar grade. Rob told me later how much hope and comfort it gave him, that despite our troubles, my response was to immediately replace the diamond in my ring. It showed him my commitment to the two of us, knowledge he badly needed at the time.

About a month later, Delia came to me in great excitement. "Mom, you're not going to believe this. I found the diamond from your ring."

The girls' room was incredibly cluttered at this point in our family life. But one day as she was shifting piles of stuff from one part of the floor to the other, she spied a glint and immediately picked up the diamond.

It seemed like such a miracle. I thought hard about it, and then took both the diamond and the ring back to the jeweler and explained the situation. "If you want me to give the new diamond back, I understand. I put in the claim in all good faith, thinking it was lost."

"Nah," the jeweler said. "The claim has been processed by our insurance company, and you're clearly not trying to pull anything over on us. You paid the deductible. The new diamond is yours."

So I put my wedding ring back on, and I put the original stone in a plastic bag and placed it in one of my jewelry storage trays.

When Rob passed away, I wore my wedding ring for almost a year, but eventually, when I started seeing Eric, I took it off and stored it in the jewelry trays. "I have two diamonds now," I told the girls. "Each of you can have one now if you like when you marry."

Several months later, I found a plastic bag on the floor of my bedroom. I discerned at a glance that it was empty, and I threw it away.

Fast forward to last year when Fiona announced that she was engaged. "Would you like one of the diamonds for your ring?" I asked. "Or you can put it in a ring to give to Alona." I went to my jewelry box--but the plastic bag with the diamond in it was gone. I suddenly remembered that plastic bag I had so thoughtlessly thrown away. Surely I hadn't carelessly discarded the miraculously rediscovered diamond--had I? I had thought the bag was empty! I dug through the trash basket, despite knowing that I had already taken that batch of trash out, and I combed over and over through the carpet.

I felt sick. I felt, absurdly, that I had let Rob down, losing the diamond he had given me not just once but twice. Now only one of my girls would get a diamond from me. Fiona tried to comfort me: "The ring I’ve picked out already has a diamond, and Alona doesn't even want a stone. It's okay, Mommy. Let Delia have the remaining diamond." I tried to let it go, but it just added to all the grief I felt at losing Rob.

Now we come to the events of this week. The carpets in my house looked awful--the wall-to-wall carpet upstairs is over thirty years old. So I asked my sister if I could borrow her carpet cleaner.

I spent hours Wednesday shifting stuff from the corners of the rooms and thoroughly vacuuming everything, using the attachment to get into the weird angles and along the baseboard. Then I went over everything again with the carpet cleaner. The water, when I emptied it into the toilet, was black and filthy.

Altogether, I worked at it for over four hours. Finally, exhausted, I sat down on my bed and gave a deep sigh. And then I happened to glance down at the floor.

There, glinting in reflection from the overhead light, was the diamond. Right between my feet.

I thought it had washed down the drain. Then I thought I had thrown it away. By all rights, I should have swept it up with either the vacuum cleaner or the carpet cleaner. But somehow or other, here it was again, back in my trembling hand: the diamond that had been in the ring that Rob had put on my finger on our wedding day. The bag HAD fallen out of the jewelry tray, but somehow, the diamond had fallen out of the bag and then hidden itself in the carpet until I found it again. Maybe running the vacuum cleaner and carpet cleaner over it had merely polished it up so that I could see it again.

That diamond has more damned lives than a cat.

My wish for you this Thanksgiving is that you have the moments of transcendent joy that I have had this week.

Background: a beige carpet. Center top: a carpet cleaning machine. Underneath is the logo for the St. Paul Local 34 Plumber and Gasfitters Union. A woman's hand hovers over the words "Local 34," reaching for a brilliant-cut diamond superimposed over the bottom of the logo. Underneath the diamond is a woman's gold wedding ring, set with another diamond.

Euphoria



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

I've been home for the past two weeks on vacation. I think I mentioned that Fiona and I had planned to take a trip to England, but that got put on ice when Fiona got her new job. So I've taken the time off (use it or lose it) and I have...not been in England.

I'm trying not to sulk too much, but that's been a bit of a challenge.

I've taken a few little day trips, as depicted in last week's card. This past weekend, Eric and I went to a bed and breakfast, and I did a half-day trip to Stillwater. But of course, my inner Puritan has looked at the fact that two weeks has been cleared on my calendar and reasoned, "Excellent, you can get to WORK and get things done. SO MANY THINGS."

But there's the heat and the fact that there is such a plethora of projects. And my inner sulk because, as noted, Not in England. Ongoing sleep issues. So my attempt to move things forward has been inching along at best.

I have continued working on clearing Rob's stuff out of the house, which is, as always, emotionally difficult. I've binned a number of books (library books so not worth anything to anyone) and I pulled out Rob's ties and sorted through them for donation (and had a good, hard cry before driving to drop them off at ARC Value Village).

I've been calling contractors trying to figure out how to get my foundation repaired (one of the contractors has the distinction of standing me up twice in one day. I will not be hiring them). I've been doing financial bookkeeping in preparation for updating my will. I've been working on the Special Project--oh, what the heck. My employer doesn't read this.

I'm job hunting.

So that's what I've been doing for the past two weeks. Inching along in various attempts to make my life better. But it feels as though progress, collectively, is so slow that it's hard to see any forward momentum without squinting hard.

Lower half: neckties on a bed. Upper half: the side of a house with a gap in the foundation facade by a door. Center right: an inchworm inches its way on a stem. Just underneath the stem is the logo for the website JibberJobber. Center left: a box packed with books. Upper right: the words "Last Will and Testament." Upper left: the logo for the website Angi.

Inching



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

This collage is in honor of three men I remembered this week.

1) May 25 was remembered in Minneapolis as the date of the death of George Floyd, whose family called him Perry. I won't call him a martyr, because martyrs deliberately choose to sacrifice themselves for a cause. George, on the other hand, wanted to live and he was just casually stopping at a local corner store for a quick errand. And then he was murdered, dammit.

But his suffering and his death, just two miles from my home, changed my city and the world, and I thought of him this week, on the third anniversary of his passing.

2) Lilacs have been blooming in Minneapolis this week, including the bush that Rob planted in the back yard thirty years ago, 'Because every house needs a lilac bush.' He's been gone for over five years, but every spring, he sends me flowers again.

3) I went to Fort Snelling Cemetery today to leave flowers on my Dad's grave, as I do every Memorial Day weekend. Thanks, Dad, for your service. Love you and miss you.

Image description: Upper half of card: picture of the mural at the George Floyd memorial (at Chicago Avenue and 38th Street), with floral tributes on the sidewalk underneath. Lower left: a vase with blooming lilac flowers. Lower right: a gravestone at Fort Snelling cemetery for Allen Stewart Kerr (Peg's father), decorated with flowers and miniature flags for Memorial Day weekend.

Remembrances



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

As you may have ascertained from last week's collage, Checklist, I have things to do. SO many things to do.

But it is very difficult because all I want to do is bury myself in a book and read.

As I have mentioned before, I am an avid reader (I've already read thirty-seven books this year. Not quite a book a day, but close). I live in a house absolutely surrounded by books--Rob was a HUGE collector. Our mutual love of books was one of the things that made us enjoy each other's company so much.

And despite being surrounded by shelf after shelf of lovingly collected books, many of them autographed, I have been transitioning to reading books on digital devices (sorry, Rob). I find it more convenient when I am on the go, as I can easily switch from one book to the next (without having to go home to get another one off the shelf). And I like reading in bed at night. A digital device works best when you are reading in the dark.

And because I am such a huge reader, I made a decision that I struggled with quite a bit.

Yes, people, I am sorry. I went over to the dark side.

*Hangs her head*

I bought a Kindle Unlimited subscription.

I have also started using Goodreads. At first, I just used it to log my books. I was genuinely startled to find out how many books I was actually reading.

Then I started paying attention to the friends feature. I was reading in one small genre slice (Jane Austen fanfiction) and I kept seeing the same names of people over and over again reviewing the kind of books I liked. Tentatively, I followed a few of them.

And then a whole new world opened up to me: I discovered notes and highlights.

Now understand: Rob was a book collector, and that meant a few rules if we wanted to live in peace together in the same household: No cracking the spine by carelessly leaving a book open facedown, no bending page tips to mark one's place. And most importantly, BOOKS WERE NOT MEANT TO BE WRITTEN IN. AT ALL.

I'd seen dotted underlines in books that I read on Kindle Unlimited but I didn't pay much attention until I started seeing notifications in my feed on Goodreads that people I had friended had left notes and highlights on books that I had often read myself.

I have been reading for probably over fifty-five years. I have been in book clubs and book manuscript critiquing groups. But this has opened up a conversation about books that I have never experienced before: I am getting to read the line-by-line reactions of people to books that we are both reading. I love it. It's WONDERFUL. It is making me engage in textual analysis in a way I never have before.

I never wrote notes in books, unless it was a manuscript I was critiquing. But a published book? Never, never, never. But last week I wrote about sixty notes in a book. And I am eager to see how people will react.

It's like the world that opened up to me when I went from the daily paper journal that I kept for just myself for thirty-five years to online blogging--and suddenly I started getting comments and reactions back to what I wrote.

This was a fun collage to do, and I quite like it. I went looking for a picture of a woman in Regency dress, reading (because Regency is the sort of fiction I am reading right now). Here is the orginal picture: A Quiet Read by William Kay Blacklock. I have been using some new digital tools, and I am pleased with what I accomplished. I put my own portrait, my photo icon from Goodreads, over in the oval tambour frame on the side. (The book against my cheek is my prized edition of Pride and Prejudice that aome gave me).

A poised young woman in Regency dress sits on a small loveseat with her feet on a footstool, reading a book. Behind her floats the open pages of a book, with marginalia written throughout. Superimposed over the book are the words "View your notes and highlights." To the side of the loveseat, on the right side of the collage, is an oval tambour frame. An oval picture of Peg's face with a book against her cheek (her Goodreads icon) is superimposed over the tambour frame.

Marginalia



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.