kenllama

As I fed 15-year-old printed financial statements into the paper shredder, I found myself feeling grateful that nothing lasts forever.

A little over five years ago, right on the cusp of the COVID pandemic, I took a couple of trips back to the house I grew up in. My parents were finally preparing to sell it and move out west, precipitated by the need for a place with fewer stairs and closer proximity to their kids.

This meant getting rid of stuff. A lot of stuff. Some of it had been mine. For reference, I was in my mid-forties and had moved away permanently straight after college. I just hadn’t gotten around to getting rid of a lot of things, before I left for college or afterward.

Some of it belonged to my brother, and the rest to my parents. It’s harder to live light when you live in the same place for 45 years, I suppose. My family also has a propensity to collect things. Not necessarily particularly valuable or expensive things, just things that we like. It’s not a hoarding situation, not quite, but the reason I was feeding 15-year-old printouts into the shredder was that the stacks of paper in my home office in Seattle had finally become untenable. I’m one of those people whose brain feels cluttered when my space feels cluttered, and unfortunately I’m also one of those people who accumulates clutter.

The thing that’s finally getting me to do something about it is that we’re going to be moving. Not sure when, and the house we’re moving to will actually be bigger, but just the thought of moving all this stuff is exhausting (and faintly embarrassing, especially after having spent time in communities where entire families live in houses the size of my bedroom). When I was helping my parents get rid of stuff in preparation for their move (the staff at the nearest dump wanted to know if we were doing a major home renovation, we were there so much) I found myself wishing I had Marie Kondo’s phone number.

Later, I was wishing for it for myself. Instead of “Does this spark joy?” my guiding question became, “Do I love this enough to pack it into a box and move it?”

Like a lot of Americans, I have too much stuff. More than I could ever need or use. Much of my current endeavor is getting some of this stuff to people who could use it, or to places where people can find it (Ebay, for example, or area thrift stores or Buy Nothing groups).

But some of it, like those 15-year-old financial statements, isn’t going anywhere but the bin. (Seattle composts shredded paper, by the way—but don’t go crazy with quantities.) What’s also going in there is stuff I wrote back then. Some of it’s interesting, especially if it got revised and reused later in something that actually got published. A lot of it, though…well, let’s just say that I no longer have any doubt that I’ve improved as a writer, though even now I’m not composing deathless prose (and I definitely wasn’t back then).

If, as a book I reviewed for Library Journal earlier this year proposes, all of our lives and everything that we do is merely the universe attempting to hasten toward equilibrium, then I’m glad that at least that the mountain of stuff I’m digging through is temporal in nature. I’m weirdly delighted to uncover patches of carpet that I haven’t seen in months if not years.

And I’m really, really glad that my separation paperwork from when I got laid off from Amazon.com in 2000 is going to be fertilizing someone’s flowerbed in the coming months.

I’ve never been satisfied marking the seasons by solstices and equinoxes. There’s nothing wrong with it—from an astronomical perspective, it’s entirely correct, and a reminder that the planet’s axial tilt is why we have seasons in the first place. But in terms of daily subjective lived experience, it’s just one marker.

Though I no longer live by it, the Wiccan Wheel of the Year maps rather nicely onto how the seasons show up where I live in the Pacific Northwest. Around the beginning of August (Lughnasadh, to give it the term Wicca swiped from the Gaelic, along with the other four cross-quarter days) I start noticing changes. The shift in balance between hours of daylight and darkness becomes noticeable. The maple trees have gone to seed and the leaves start turning. Squirrels and Steller’s jays increase their activity, caching seeds and nuts in whatever soil they can find (which sometimes includes my vegetable planters). Though the hottest days of the arc between June and September are still ahead, there’s a sense of age to the season, of everything drying out and getting tired. Literally; when I go backpacking during August, depending on the trail water may be difficult to find. At the same time, seasonal fruits show up at the neighborhood farmer’s markets in abundance.

By the time September rolls around, end-of-summer and Labor Day weekend festivals proliferate. In America this timing is governed by the beginning of the school year as much as anything; as someone who used to live by the academic calendar myself, I have a lingering awareness of this. But it adds to the sense of acceleration as the season turns, with the autumnal equinox now a mere few weeks away. Summer went by so fast.

A few evenings ago in the middle of something or other, I paused. Through the open windows from outside came the sound of the first migrating waterfowl of the season. Geese and ducks don’t know when the equinox is, but they know when it’s time to go.

The Wheel happens to line up nicely where I live now; Samhain feels like the start of winter to me, and Imbolc feels like the start of spring. But this is really just a happy coincidence. The markers of the seasons’ turn here are what they are, and the successive peoples who’ve lived here over the centuries—especially those who were here for millennia before European-descended colonists showed up—have had their own ways of observing them. In other places, it’s different. When I was in the Kalahari Desert last fall, the people there paid far less attention to the relationship between planetary tilt and solar alignment; there’s far less variation. But they had a fine appreciation for shifts in weather patterns, and especially seasonal cycles of drought and rain.

Noticing these local manifestations of seasonal change helps me connect to the place that I’m living in. I’ve lived so much of my life in front of a screen, as so many of us do, that any reminder that what’s on the screen is a facsimile of the physical reality I’m living in feels meaningful. I’ve yet to see an AI-generated image as fascinating to me as the veins and curls of a browning maple leaf, and I don’t think I want to. The image is constantly reminding me that it’s only an image, while the leaf is constantly reminding me of the expanse of space and time, far beyond what my human perception will ever be able to encompass. I welcome that enormity.

Fall always makes me a little sad. I welcome that, too.

Weekend before last I attended my first WorldCon in ten years. It was fulfilling and exhausting in about equal measure, with some notes of grace and frustration.

Probably like most cons, but since I go to very few—this was only my third WorldCon ever—my experience in this respect is limited. I chose to go to this one because it was held in Seattle, and I live here. While I haven’t been to hometown cons much (SakuraCon, Norwescon, and Emerald City Comic Con are all held here), this one seemed like an opportunity to give them another try. As a recovering Shy Person I often had a hard time interacting with people much at conventions if I didn’t already know them, and since I never went to many I didn’t know very many of the people who tend to go to conventions.

The Internet’s made a big difference in this respect. While I’ve been online for a long time (over 30 years), the growth of online spaces for both fannish conversations and professional networking has been really helpful. I also intentionally went to events where I would have to talk to people, like designated networking events, table talks, and the like. (I spent most of the hour with Ellen Datlow trying and failing to come up with something brilliant to ask her, but at least I was there!) I managed to collect quite a few business cards (the digital alternatives that exist now are nice, but I’ve gotta say, there’s really nothing like a physical object that I can look at later, and that will remind me that I meant to through the physical fact of its presence) and contact details for people I might connect with further. I ran into friends I hadn’t seen in years (and also failed to run into friends and colleagues I’d hoped to encounter—WorldCon isn’t that big, but it’s big enough) and may have made a few new ones. I got to hear Ada Palmer read from yet to be published work, and a city planner from Walla Walla explain why bureaucracy will continue to be important in the future—even if it turns out that nobody really knows what future jobs will look like.

I was reminded yet again of my guideline for convention panels, which is to select on the basis of who’s on them, and only secondarily on the topic.

I also pretty much skipped the parties. This had more to do with having become an early-morning person with a new kitten at home than anything else, though I did take my husband to the Weird Al Yankovic concert at White River Amphitheater on Friday night. (We left during the encore. If you’re familiar with this venue, you know why.) So perhaps I could’ve been a little more social. Then again, given the COVID spike we’re having here right now, maybe it’s just as well that I wasn’t.

I also skipped the Hugos, because I was exhausted by the start time and figured I could watch them on stream at home. When I got home I went to bed instead, and only heard how the ceremony went the next day when I had coffee with a friend who’d been nominated and won. People who were actually there and have a far better sense of how awards ceremonies go have pretty much said what needs to be said on that score; myself, I only wish that the awards could be done right consistently.

I know that fan-run cons are struggling; the commercially ones are much larger, at least appear to be more professional, and can attract guests from across a wider range of media. There seem to be a lot of potential problems with the way WorldCon runs specifically, as much as I like the idea of its moving around and being hosted by different people and a different locale every year. Whether there’s still a place for that and whether the myriad challenges of programming, accessibility, and administering the awards can be addressed to any kind of consistent level of success…I honestly don’t know. There’s something to be said for something community run, though. I hope WorldCon figures it out.