The Clothesline Episode {YouTube Video} & living my best summer life

July 21, 2024

At the end of last month we made a final trip back to Montreal to help Ciel move out of the apartment that was our family’s home for the last 9 years. We also had the last of our stuff to bring back to Nova Scotia, including our washer & dryer.

Shortly after our mid-June move my dad installed our clothesline, and I spend most of the video talking to you from that clothesline. First about that trip back to Montreal and then about the clothesline itself, and my clothesline history and affection.

Hence, this video’s title. The Clothesline Episode.

If you’re reading this in email you’ll have to click through to the blog to watch it. Or head straight to YouTube.

If you watched my last video, or read this blog post you’ll know that in the days after moving here I was enchanted with this place, plus feeling quite disoriented and needing to get my life in order.

The disorientation is gone, completely. And after our return from the final move out of Montreal, and our physical recovery from that trip (I slept till 2pm the day after our return!) I have felt myself being restored in body, mind, and spirit.

Emotionally I am very happy, in the honeymoon period with our new lives here. (This is circumstantial happiness, the kind that is fleeting, the kind that disappears in difficulty. I know all that but I'm still going to enjoy it for as long as it lasts.)

I expected a time like this based on my past experience of other moves. I feel deep satisfaction in setting up a home and putting everything in its place. I feel joy in new experiences and discovering new things and new places.

But here it’s more than discovery. In fact, I haven’t “discovered” anything I haven’t encountered on our many previous visits over the last 17 years my parents have lived in NS, and the 13 years they lived in this home.

I think the discovery I’m experiencing in this move is the discovery of a new life stage, the empty nest. That I get to make this discovery in a beautiful place and a beautiful home, with people I am so happy to share my life with feels like a fairy tale.

Maybe it is.

The grief of leaving the kids is gone. (Am I allowed to say that?) The worry and anxiety about how we were going to pull this all off, gone. The emotional, mental and relational fatigue of the last couple months, also gone.

All the questions of “how will this work?”, right down to details like “where will be park the truck and trailer when moving Ciel into their new apartment?” have been answered.

My mood is significantly improved and enhanced by few more things:

I’m not in school right now and my calendar and mental energy feel spacious because of this. (I'm basically on vacation from school.) There is time for all the things, including berry picking on weekday mornings and swimming in the afternoons.
It’s summer! And my body and spirit have come alive, humming with vitality, in the way that only summer can elicit in me.

I love all the seasons, can’t say I have a favorite, but summer has often been for me a season that bursts at the seams with vitality. Not every summer has been like this, but enough have that been like this so that it is the state my heart, mind and body know and want to return to. This year the conditions are pretty much perfect and I have slipped into that remembered groove and rhythm with so much gratitude it makes me want to weep.

Ok, actually 3 things:

I’m living summer in an amazing summer place and I cannot overstate the influence of nature on my well-being. I live surrounded by trees and colorful blossoming flowers (thanks to my parents’ years of garden investment) that bring the bees, birds, and butterflies into my line of sight all.day.long. I have so many photos and so much video footage to hopefully be made into something to share.

And that’s just the experience from my kitchen sink and office window. The beauty ripples from there. Just pulling out of the driveway is a gorgeous encounter, every time. Even running errands is a visual feast, cruising along the river or country roads, taking the ferry to get bread! I haven’t even mentioned the ocean and the lake where we swim on these hot July afternoons.

After hot, noisy, and smelly summer city living, being here is like heaven. (For the record, I love Montreal. I loved living there, and I love Montreal in the summer. It is has incredible energy. But my nerves and body feel different here.)

Actually, one more thing:

I live in the most beautiful home I’ve ever known as an adult. It’s almost embarrassing to write about because it feels a bit taboo to write about having a nice house. It feels like a brag. But I have nothing to brag about. I can’t take credit for this or point to anything I’ve done that should yield such beauty and comfort in my life. This actually makes it more taboo to write about.

I look forward to writing about our home in the coming years and talking about its importance to me and our family and my deep affection for it because of who built it, and the love and attention that was put into its creation. As an adult I’ve never lived in a house with this much relational meaning in its very structure, a meaning I am steeped in everyday while just going about my life.

Basically life this summer is drenched in the beauty of nature and craftsmanship, feelings of connection and deep meaning, while sipping (ok, maybe guzzling) from that refreshing and effervescent cocktail called “empty nest freedom”.

I know to be suspect of things that are too good to be true. Also, that fairy tales aren’t real. But this summer, as we’d say in grad school, "is challenging those narratives".