The powder blue jewelry box, the kind girls had in 1960, has a pink satin lining and two little balconies that lift up when you open it. The box has been stripped of my sister’s treasures–Girl Scout pins, circle pins, a plastic barrette shaped like a Scottie–on its way down the long tunnel labeled Donate. We are moving. I have entered the lawless Land of Downsizing. There is no map and there are no boundaries. Anything goes. Or rather, everything goes.

My day begins readying four boxes that the grandkids will whisk away. I would rather be in my office, at my desk, deep in the writing routine that, on a normal day, I’d be griping about. I would rather be researching my next book. Reading up on:

• Italian motorcycle racers in the 1930s
• tuberculosis sanitoriums
• Roswell, New Mexico and UFO sightings,
• radio astronomy and the Very Large Array

I stuff a box with every candle and candle-holder and glass votive we own. Candles are not allowed in the Impossibly Upbeat Retirement Community (Activities! Exercise! New Friends!).  What if I forget how to write? Or forget why I write. Why do I write? Hard to say, faced with a stack of tablecloths. But I like words a lot and sentences even better. If I could paint or play music, I would. But words and sentences are how I peer into the mysterious. And everything is mysterious.

I take it back. The blazers, blouses and wineglasses I’m giving away aren’t mysterious, but the notebooks, letters and journals I’ve saved are. At least they were before they landed in a box marked Shred.  When everything is shredded, will I forget about the character Kyle I was trying to develop, who let his tropical fish die after his wife left him? He had potential.

I enter an even more mysterious world when I turn to books. Almost more than family photographs, books hold the progression of my life. Time slows as I travel the distance from my mother’s girlhood copy of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett to my recent purchase of The Sellout by Paul Beatty. Books are more than objects; for me, each is a portal to a place, time, person or project from the past. Shall I keep the books I collected while researching the stories in What My Last Man Did? Books on:

• the Storyville district of New Orleans
• the architecture of Galveston, Texas
• McClellan Air Force Base
• “Everyday Life” in 1880
• Louisiana’s gens de couleur libre

Shall I keep the books that I want to re-read? Such as:

• Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (and do I need all three editions?)
• The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald (it saved me once; I should save it)
• The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard (no reason, just brilliant)
• Rubicon by Tom Holland (ancient Rome: can’t get enough)

Perhaps it’s best to confront books in small batches, so I return to other problems. I worry that letting go of my family’s Navajo rugs, Lionel train set, Rosenthal china service, and military foot lockers (“Capt. Lowell C. Lewis AO 60233”) will also remove some Jenga piece of my brain that I need for processing words, sentences, life.

In the land of Downsizing there is the ever-present danger of entering a fugue state in which I lose an hour sorting, say, a box of worthless earrings. Which means, suddenly it’s lunchtime. The spouse makes a sensible ham sandwich, while I grab yogurt, because food-time is a luxury. (Note: the spouse is also downsizing but has troubles of his own. He lives in the equally difficult Territory of Spinal Stenosis.) After lunch, a beautiful respite: errands, including the Vashon Public Library. Returning books I haven’t read yet. Checking out books I won’t get to. Listening to Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward in the car. Driving through a wild day of high winds, with downed branches of Douglas fir strewn across the road.

Aside from the books I’m saving, I now have a list of books I would be reading if I weren’t downsizing:

• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford
• The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers edited by Brian Turner
• The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett
• Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
• American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee

Energized by the positive ions shooting off the books at the Vashon Library, I fill two more boxes at home. These are marked with a cryptic S, which stands for “Save and put in Storage.” But it could also stand for Sad because I’ll probably never look at them again.

Before dinner, before baking the salmon and sautéing some cauliflower and putting on some Mozart, I allow a thirty-minute stretch of reading time rarely found here in Downsizing. Currently, it centers on two books–yes, I would read them simultaneously if I could–and they are Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor and The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone. Today I opt for the latter, but it’s never an easy choice.

After watching what passes for news in 2018, I go to bed. I think about the blue jewelry box, which my sister saved for more than 50 years. It blooms into entire rooms, shelves and closets I haven’t tackled yet. To dilute the adrenalin, I listen to Thomas Hardy. Thomas Hardy on an iPhone. The Return of the Native read by Alan Rickman. If I can remember how to write, I will describe his voice.

Like light through a stained-glass window… or stars speaking on a clear night…

~

NOT THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What book is on your night table now and how did it find its way there?

• My nightstand is literally a bookcase, but I’ll pick one near the top: The Night Manager by John le Carré. I own all his books, and I read this one when it first came out. But after watching the recent TV mini-series–with Hugh Laurie doing a wonderful villain–I decided to read the book again. It’s still fabulous.

2. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Circuitous.

3. If you find yourself with an extra fifteen minutes, what do you do?

• I contemplate the works of Augustine and Montaigne. Just kidding: I play Boggle on my phone.

~

By Andrea Lewis:

IAM
IAM
IAM

IA

—Other Writers in the Series—

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

March 1, 2018: Andrea Lewis

Narrow and tall, a moody gray, soft to the touch…all good, but the first thing to charm me was the title. What My Last Man Did. Ten stories that take us on a journey to the center of a family. “Tierra Blanca” leads us in with the voice of Hannah.

I had what I wanted. I was alone with Charles. He was driving and I was so nervous I was tearing little pieces off the edges of his road map.

I envied him these passions. If you had passions, you were living. Without them, you were watching–the way I was watching desert sand and half-dead creosote go by and wishing I’d stop craving attention from Charles.

The reader in me was getting comfortable, and then with this implicit exposition, a clever way to add backstory, the writer in me picked up her pencil and started to take notes.

I did not mention the sinkhole that threatened to suck me back into Galveston. Did not mention my sister Iris or how she once pointed a Remington over/under shotgun at a flesh-colored Chrysler Newport full of developers my mother had invited to evaluate our land. Did not mention…

Can you imagine a description that would bring paper towels to life?

The few boxes I had brought from Texas shared shelf space with boxes of brown paper towels that emitted the same alkaline aroma of defeat I remembered from junior-high bathrooms back home.

Toward the end of “Rancho Cielito,” you’ll discover stunning dialogue working in so many ways, but first, this lyrical passage that intertwines memory and place.

The heat of Galveston hits me as a thing measured more in memories that in degrees. Whenever I come home I find myself gauging heat and humidity by how much childhood grief they churn up. I never manage to separate the measurable from the immeasurable, the atmospheric from the melodramatic, the actual density of the air from the scents and sounds and sights it carries…The damp packed earth beneath the magnolias was our playground but even when I was small I watched the middle distance, as if my destiny might arise from the grooved line where the mangroves met the sky.

In “Queen Juliette” we take a leap back to 1895 and this description that both assures us it is 1895 and lets us know that fun things were happening even back then.

His wife paraded their daughter before me like a veal calf on market day. Seraphina Carolina Kincaid Gerrity. A lovely child, perhaps eighteen, overdressed and nervous under the ferret gaze of her mother. Mounds of alabaster flesh on display. The girl’s pink frock was so puffy she threatened to levitate to the punched-tin ceiling. She had pleasing green eyes and shot me the occasional mischievous glance. While my first thought was Frederick should meet this girl, I did find myself attracted.

Story number four, “Straight Next Time,” gives us a first sentence that curls its finger before us, luring us in.

Without Christophe, we would have perished on 12 August 1901.

The title story includes one of my favorite lines ever: “He kisses like he’s been to every world inside her.” And this.

I stole Cate’s dress off a high-nose white lady at the station. Stole her trunk and fenced the jewelry and a coat and alligator shoes. But the jiggly beads and shiny blue are Cate. Not just for the way she sings. Blue I’ll bet you anything is the color of her soul. I never knew a girl so happy and so sad at once. Smiling, crying, yelling, loving, eating, singing. She’s a runaway train no matter what.

In “Tchoupitoulas,” in addition to a terrific ending, another line I want to remember.

For Louis the world was maps, music, timetables, trains.

In the openings to the last four stories, Andrea’s range and skill is apparent.

“Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me” > Louis melds from the yellow afternoon into the tavern’s soft dark. Blinded, he goes by smell–spent matches, oiled wood, stale beer.

“The Empire Pool” > When I was nineteen my fiancé died. He died for England on May 10, 1943, in a mortar attack southwest of Tunis.

“Castle Bravo” > Carrington raised the silver coffeepot and forced herself to smile. She poured coffee violently enough to splash a few drops onto Alicia Parker’s pink dress.

“Family Cucurbita” > I had known Rick for twenty minutes before he told me about his wife’s dead uterus.

This collection is not to miss–the character development, the relationship between the two sisters, the slow build, the look backward to see how Iris and Hannah became who they are, the way these ten stories become so much more… What My Last Man Did won the Blue Light Books Prize, an annual award given to an outstanding short story collection or poetry collection on alternating years. The collection was published by the Indiana University Press in 2017. Its author, Andrea Lewis, is a founding member of Richard Hugo House–a place to read words, hear words, and make your own words better.

Come back on MARCH 1st to read how ANDREA LEWIS spends her days.