Sorting through the boxes

Have you saved every letter you ever got and every photo you ever took? It seems we have, boxes and boxes of them, moved from house to house, stored in attics, garages, rented storage spaces. We moved 21 times in the last 40 years, although we did spend 23 years in one house. We’ve discarded so much in the process, but these boxes moved each time, with the idea that… Well, it’s hard to remember the exact idea that made these items worth saving.

Going through them now, discarding letters from people I can’t remember, wondering what to do with letters from the dead, I do find random pieces of our history, like this, the receipt for $25 the first month’s rent on the first place Larry and I lived together, a moldy, decrepit and perfectly wonderful float house on Cowichan Lake in Youbou, BC. We rented it from Mr. and Mrs. Gold.

Looking at this receipt brings back that month, March, 1969, living on practically nothing in that drafty cabin with its smelly oil stove and gorgeous setting. I remember the shyness of first living with someone, listening to Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, Cream, the Chambers Brothers, Dylan–all new to me, learning to add cinnamon to French Toast, friends visiting from California, various adventures and misadventures.

The float house looked something like this if you take away the other houses and canoe,  cut off the extension on the left and add a footbridge from the shore. It was three rooms, furnished with rickety chairs and table, a saggy bed in each bedroom. There must have been a bathroom, though I don’t remember it or how the plumbing worked in relation to the lake. The lake itself was magnificent. In fact, if you plunked the float house at the end of this walkway, you ‘d have a sense of it.

One epiphany I remember, sitting  on the dock one evening at sunset was that if you believed in God–and the sunset was performing its divine light show over the lake–everything that happened to you would be a manifestation of his care. It would be a great comfort to believe in that, but of course, there was no faking belief. For those of us without it, the existential anxiety of living in the world was a given. But as keenly as I felt that anxiety–and it was much stronger then, my whole uncharted life before me–I preferred, or rather was rooted in, unbelief so had to make the best of it. So much for my thoughts just before my 21rst birthday. Somewhat similar to my thoughts now.

Anyway, thinking of that time made me think of this poem by Robert Creeley, one of my favorites of his:

Something

I approach with such
a careful tremor, always
I feel the finally foolish