April 8, 2025—One of my daughters and her daughter are helping me pack. They’ve come the long day’s drive to move me out of the cabin. It’s a slow process . . . pack for storage, donate, carry down the street to my temporary home? They are patient and full of energy, efficient, taping box after box. We’d spent the morning while I was fresh going through the dishes in my red cupboard. Some are old and valuable, some precious just for their much use and memories. They say your children and grandchildren don’t want your collected things, but sometimes they do, if they can choose. We talk about what pieces the granddaughters who aren’t here may want, the sets I’ve already promised. I save the ones I still want to use when we gather at my tables.

Now it is late afternoon. I sit on a sturdy box to rest as they bring piles of blankets and books to me. I have lots of both. Most of the books I could’t part with have been packed but another boxful is saved. They each choose a few for themselves from my donate pile. Then my daughter holds up a soft, lightweight quilt . . . pastel pink and lavender squares, tied with embroidery thread. I begin to cry as I reach for it. She’s worried. It was the only blanket my guy could tolerate sleeping under if it was cold. He was always too warm, the furnace I warmed myself by for fifty-five years, I tell her. I put it in the pile to carry over to the condo. I won’t wash it. I’ll pull it down from the closet shelf when I stretch out for a nap. It takes us four days to empty the cabin, the menfolk working tirelessly in the garage. They’d known what I hadn’t, that I wouldn’t be able to do this myself.

We’ve saved other things to use in the new cabin. The old round top Frigidaire, interior doors, the Scandinavian benches Grandma Edna commissioned for both sides of the fireplace . . . and some of these old Golden Glow plants from below the porch. My neighbors helped me dig up a few pots of them along with Shasta Daisies and purple Cone Flowers from out front. Now in August they’re blooming in those pots in my neighbor’s yard, waiting. My favorite August beauties. I think it’s part of processing life without him . . . the remembering, the letting yourself feel it all and not trying to fix it, the carrying him with me.