Finishing School

I have a penchant for new things, especially new ideas and new books. Oddly enough, at the same time, I have an almost stodgy love of the familiar. I find it very comforting to be able to close my eyes and know where everything is.



At first I thought this longing for the familiar was because I was in the midst of so many new things, but it has been a part of me since the days I was old enough to ride a bike on my own. I lived in a time and a place where I could hop on my bike and be gone all day exploring a creek near our house or roads that wandered through neighborhoods with their own patches of yard and trees and dogs without raising any alarms. I hope somewhere kids can still do that.

A favorite game on my bike riding adventures was to follow a road to its very absolute end. This could get pretty tricky when roads veed or, worse, still, wound round in circles in the developments where roads were meant to look less like they were part of a development. Neither houses nor flwoer beds can ever quite accomplish the insouciance of nature, so I often had to go round in quasi circles and ellipses to follow a road to its end.

The exploring part of the adventuring always ended as the sun got lower in the sky. The last part of the trip was to race home before the last light was gone. As I pedald past the houses whose lights were just coming on in the windows, I wondered briefly about the people behind them, but, after exploring, I craved the familiarity of home. The bike adventure always contained both a beginning and a finishing.

Unfortunately, many of my current adventures do not have a built-in conclusion. I have several short stories in draft, several knitting projects that are in various stages of almost done, a flower bed that has been cleared but not replanted, and the rooms in the house that I had targeted for the first wave of refurbinshing are still sitting not quite done. All this un-done was tasking my energy, so I sent myself to finishing school--not the posh how to walk gracefully and set an elegant table kind of school--the buckle down and don't stop til it's over school.

I started with my leg warmers. I did not quite get them done in a day, but I got them done before I did anything else. I finished my sea weed scarf. OK, again not a big project, but all things are created equal I decided in my finishing school. Ironically, this post languished a day or two in my dashboard, but, now, it too, will see the light of day. I will probably never graduate from finishing school, but I will move on to larger projects. As the days stretch into a reasonable balance of light and non-light, I feel a hopefulness returning.