Liminal

More than just a phase

Liminal: of or relating to a transitional stage of a process

So here I am, nearly at the Winter Solstice. It got cold and dark in the late afternoon today and I felt it. After I got back from walking a package to the post office, it took forever for my fingers to warm up. I press the backs of my knuckles to my cheek and they’re dead cold. I snuggled under my favorite green blanket. Read a bit of Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. Football in the background. Chili on the stove, exhaust fan humming lightly. Now red wine. Christmas tree.

I’m restless.

I’ve always had what I now recognize as an artist’s / performer’s drive. As a kid, I danced, sang, told stories, re-enacted skits from The Carol Burnett Show, played piano by ear and through 10 years of lessons and recitals and competitions, played kazoo, wrote stories, pretended with my friends that we were Stranded In The Yukon. Pretended that we were in the Lake Placid Olympics with our timed “bobsled” run. When it came to visual art…meh. I painted a picture of the family dog in 7th grade that my mom framed, but that’s not where it was at for me. Journals galore at one point.

My medium shifted as life went on, from theater to radio to theater again (while part-time-radio-ing), some travel blogging…and finally I found my way into VO and narration work and that’s where my outlet has been for a little over a decade.

During that time, raising two smart beautiful caring daughters who are now in college, supporting a spouse who was often frustrated by the state of academia and is now retired. All of those roles are shifting.

A year from now, we will live in a totally new area of the country. We will have sloughed everything we no longer want. Books we’ve either read or won’t ever read. Dog brushes, collars and toys that Maggie, Wally and Murphy don’t need anymore. A cupboard full of water bottles, travel mugs, cupcake making supplies and koozies that will find new homes or be recycled, but they won’t be ours. With each successive holiday this year, we’ve looked at the decor, the napkins, the serving ware and asked: take or leave?

During this in-between phase, I want to acknowledge: as of today, all four of us are in this home, the only one we’ve known as a family other than an apartment on Keizerstraat in Antwerpen, Belgium in the spring of 2007. We know where our daughters are in college, though one may transfer so that’s an unknown.

We do not yet know our next address. We might choose a home, a condo, a townhouse. It could be new or a hundred years old (though I sincerely hope not…we’ve done the old house thing since 1997 and I’m ready for ease). We don’t know our new neighborhood or neighbors. I have friends in our new town, thank goodness.

We are spending this holiday season in the Not Knowing. Enjoying our neighbors and friends in our town all the more for the impending departure.

And creatively, I am restless.

This is such a big change, it feels as though I could make other big changes now and it would somehow be easier to explain. Part of the reason for starting this (blog? Newsletter?) is a curiosity about the possibilities and a desire to document this liminal phase of life.