Reading: Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Until the Celebration

Moving: Walked 3.6 miles

Learning: nothing about Perl

House: packed the cookbooks, the field guides, the cockatiel and other parrot books.

9 May 2000: Willow and other fantasies

So I'm a slacker. Nothing for six days. Was the good enchantress's name in "Willow" Riselle? Or was that the fairy apparition's or the mean Snow White's stepmother one's name? Anyway, after Willow morphs her back into human form, she strokes her faded papery skin and wonders, "Has it been so long?"

I've been reading the Green Sky books, now that I have all of them, and of course this past weekend I therefore had to reread The Changeling. Cue choked up tears of self-righteous self-pity.

Nothing in Below the Root struck me like these two passage from And All Between (New York: Atheneum, 1976) pp 64, 185:

"The workers had been released so quickly and in such great numbers that adequate preparation and organization had bee impossible, and the tunnels around the city were packed with searchers, crossing and recrossing the same areas, and occasionally stopping to ask each other exactly whom it was they had been sent to rescue."

"Except that whomever is chosen must be willing to share the risks of our mission."

It is some comfort to me to know that my proof-reader's eye is not completely dead and I will swarm up from my grave to correct misuse of the object pronoun.

The verb "to be" takes only subject pronouns: "It is I." "Was that he?" I don't care if it sounds funny or wrong; I'm a prescriptivist and I say it's right. The Erdlings might have been sent to rescue someone, but the object of their search is still the "who it was." Whoever is chosen might be the object of someone's choice, but that person would first be the subject of that passive construction.

Ecofeminist and pacifist children's literature (with the occasional grammatical glitch). Who knew?

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RDC chided me this weekend for worrying about small stuff that doesn't need to be worried over--welcome to my small world. One thing that I am rightfully concerned over is our lack of truck. U-Haul won't confirm more than two weeks out, and Penske and some other company I forget charge 5x as much per day as U-Haul. Right now, I'm beginning to think that paying that much will be worth it, just to make sure it's done.

This weekend I dismantled a lot of the kitchen. I took the Fractured Proverbs off the fridge. I packed utensils into tall Tupperware meant for pasta. I threw out a lot of rusty migratory baking dishes.

"Migratory" is anything we brought from Connecticut; the term referred primarily to foodstuffs like chick peas and pasta which we were eating for months upon arrival. Yes, we brought everything. When JGW first saw how much crap we had, he was doubtful we could cram it into the truck. As soon as RDC's collarbone was healed enough to dismantle the waterbed, we did, at which point I emptied the storage locker I'd hired in May straight into the bedroom of our ski-lodge tenement. (We were still sleeping on the futon in the living room, because his collarbone hadn't healed enough for the waterbed, which we were trashing anyway.) So in August, when JGW arrived to help us load the truck, he looked at the scores of copy boxes and dozens of milk crates and raised an eyebrow. He thought we'd have to bring the bikes on the Terrapin's roof rack at least. But we didn't.

The brilliance of my copy-box and milk-crate strategy was the symmetry they lent to the packing of the truck. They all went in first, and the mattress and box spring, freshly delivered by EJB (whose wedding present they were) were roped in to hold all the boxes in place like a dike. Then the computer (singular, in those days) and the stereo components, all in their original boxes. Then the furniture (such as it was: one bookcase, one desk, a bureau, a table, a rocker, a futon). Then the television, bikes, and skis. Unpackable weird kitchen shapes and Blake's playpen went into the Terrapin, as did my animals, who I did not want to smother in a box [hmm--smother can be both a transitive and an intransitive verb; here I mean the latter so "who" is correct], and then we were done.

The absence of symmetry has made me dread this move. I realize that is my own small mania. The absence of a truck, on the other hand, will make the move worse, to the point of impossible, because I have no idea how to put an eight-foot couch into an Outback Impreza, not even a willingly commodious one like Cassidy.

And no JGW to help. Or EJB, or DEDB, or SPG, or MAV, or RRP.

RRP cried when we left. I didn't: I couldn't. But I remember her brave, tear-streaked face, and the card she pressed into my hand (like Ida giving Laura the lace in These Happy Golden Years) is in my greeting card collage.

So the rusty migratory baking pans were yet another reminder that we're never going back. RRP was excited for us when I told her about buying the house, but she emailed a few days later having realized we really mean it, that this is not a five-year vacation but really moving away.

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Wahooo! I figured if David Bowie and Stephen King could do it, so could she. And she did! I love A.S. Byatt. Watch as I cast everything, including children's books, to the winds in June when I get hold of her new book. The site isn't as slick, by a long shot, as Bowie's or That Man's or even the Cowboy Junkies', whose Maple Music Amazon-alternative crashed my browser. But she talked about the process of writing Possession, the inspirations, the scaffolding, the men behind the curtain. Just what I've always wanted.