Furniture Moving

Here we are, close to the midpoint of summer, which for me is Music Week--although as I think about it, for me, the midpoint was really a few weeks ago.  Music Week starts on Sunday, and my summer shifts a bit.  I'll be more involved at Lutheridge, after my seminary class ends Tuesday.

My mom and dad are coming for Lutheridge, but they'll have lodging at camp; we'll do happy hour down here at our house.  My former pastor and his wife will be staying with us; she'll be part of Music Week, and he'll be taking all sorts of pictures.  We've been trying to get the house into better shape for next week's festivities, and this yesterday, we made great progress.

When we first moved to this house, we bought a sleep sofa (the one in the picture above).  We had a hazy plan that we'd have a sleep sofa in the main living area and a futon/daybed option in the second main floor bedroom, which we primarily use as a study.  But as we've lived in the house, we've seen better possibilities for the layout:  move the sleep sofa into the study and get some smaller furniture to go with the two larger chairs in the living area.

We have since replaced the sliding glass doors with more energy efficient models, which meant that it was no longer easy to move the sofa through the doors, which is one way to get from the main living area to the study, outside across the deck.  Happily, my spouse figured out how to take the feet off the sofa, which meant we could move it through the house.  We also had to remove the door to the study and then put it back, but happily, that was easy.

The filing cabinet has been in the middle of our main living space, along with a teak table and two bar stools that used to be on our beautiful front porch in S. Florida.  We moved the filing cabinet to the study, and we moved the teak table and chairs to the deck, under the tented portion of the deck that means we can use the deck when it rains.  

I went to pick up the table and chairs that we bought on Monday, a much smaller table and chairs than the teak table and bar stools.  Yesterday we assembled them and put them in place:

The sides of the table can be extended to turn it into a round table, which means four people could eat dinner comfortably, and more, if we seated them creatively.  But most important, we can move around the kitchen without bumping into furniture.

There's still a lot of work left to do before the house is "finished."  I'm not showing pictures of unpainted drywall, or of the loft which is much further away from being "finished" than the lower level.  I've got some sorting to do of the piles that are on the desk in the study:

It's a much less Instagram-ready photo, isn't it?  But I like that it gives an idea of how we're more likely to live, a more honest look.

We Love Jesus, Yes We Do! We Love Jesus, How 'Bout You?

Yesterday I went for my morning walk and went by the dining hall in the minutes before breakfast, when all the campers wait outside.  I heard this chant/shout:  "We love Jesus, yes we do.  We love Jesus, how 'bout you?"  Then another group chanted/shouted the same thing back, only louder.  It was both a challenge between cabins/groups and a way of keeping kids occupied until the dining hall was ready for them.

Some might say, "Yes, and it was also indoctrination!"  Perhaps.  We might be kinder and say it was theological training.  But it seems less a way of mind control than a way of keeping kids focused and out of trouble while waiting to go into the dining hall.

Yesterday was the kind of day where there was lots of shouting in the news cycle.  Lately, it seems like every day is a day of lots of shouting in the news cycle.  I reflected on the purposes of shouting:  drowning out competing voices, keeping people focused, raising people's emotions for good or evil purposes.

When the news cycle shouts at me, I often turn off the TV/radio/internet site.  Yesterday, listening to children chanting/shouting outside the camp dining hall, I was charmed and wanted to linger.

But it's not my week of volunteering, not my week to enjoy breakfast at camp.  And so I rambled onward, picking a few berries out of the brambles on the downslope of the hill that took me away from the dining hall.

My First Publication

I don't submit to as many literary journals as I once did, and I have a variety of reasons for that state of affairs.  The main one is that it costs so much more than it once did to submit.  I know that journals will tell us that they aren't charging much more than the cost of postage, printer ink, and paper, but I can do math, and that's just not true.  They charge 3-5 times more than the cost of postage.  

And yes, I could afford a year's worth of fees, but do I want to spend my money that way?  Just on the slim chance that a poem will appear in a journal?  If my goal is to have readers, I'd have more people see my poem if I published it on Facebook or on this blog.  If my goal is to have my poems in a form where future generations might see it, I might be better off taking all those fees and self-publishing in book form, and then sending that book to as many libraries as possible. 

The odds of publishing have never been great, but before social media, I didn't have the same sense of how many people were submitting to journals.  And most of us are writing work of high caliber; I know, because I often see some of those poems on social media.  Mine are no better, no worse.  How does one catch an editor's eye for inclusion?  I know it's a matter of luck, of timing, of connection.  I might have something to do with that (knowing an editor, having a specific poem that fits a specific topic/form), but it's rare.

One thing that's strange about me is that I like the process of submitting.  I like going through my poems and putting together a packet of poems that speak to each other.  I like remembering the poems I've written and thinking about them as a larger way.

Still, I submit occasionally, especially when it's free, and I've gotten encouragement in the past.  This morning, I submitted a packet of poems to Beloit Poetry Journal.  Long ago, when I was first submitting poems printed on paper and mailed in envelopes, I sent a packet to them, and they published it.  That was in 1997 or so, and I've been submitting regularly since with no luck.  But I submit because it makes me happy to remember that long ago acceptance.

For a lark, I went to the BPJ website to see if my poem is in the archive.  It isn't, but my name is there.  Happily, I could go to my own records to help myself remember the name of the poem, and astonishingly, I still have a copy of the poem, and not just the journal itself (which I do have, but which is in a box packed away and hard to retrieve on a whim).

I do tend to keep everything--it's the grad school training in me, the knowledge of how important manuscripts can be, long after they find "final" form in publication.  So, to close this blog post, here's a copy of one of my first publications, which appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, in 1997 or 1998 (along with a gentle reminder that the speaker in the poem is not autobiographical--real life Kristin did not feel this way):

Land Mine Treaty


I’d like to have a baby,
but there is no
Cambodian farmer
so desperate for cash and vegetables
that he is willing
to dig up any field
as he hunts for old land mines
or just more land to farm.
No one to plow my acreage,
no one who will risk that
explosion.