Greetings, friends. My grandfather Luther Erle used to retell the family legend that his grandfather, who was also known as Luther, had ran away from home as a teenager, and lied about his age in order to enlist in the Union army during the American Civil War. At least, I had always regarded the tale as a legend, because stories like this are so common as to be almost cliché, from the ancient Roman legions clear down to Audie Murphy.

After reading Shelby Foote’s monumental history The Civil War: A Narrative over a period of months some years back, I became intensely curious about my family’s own participation in that conflict. I have already told the story of the elder Luther elsewhere, but I hope those of you have heard it before will indulge the reiteration.

My patrilineal great-great-grandfather was baptized Augustus Martin Luther Erle in 1847. He was the eldest surviving son of Carl Ludwig Erle, who was the first Erle in my family in America.

Carl Erle himself originally came from Hanover in 1824 by way of Ellis Island, and then settled in upstate Pennsylvania, which had a large community of German settlers. He became a Lutheran minister and preached entirely in German until the age of 70, when his parishioners petitioned for a pastor who could preach in English. For all I know, he may not have even spoken English.

Greetings, friends. I am writing this in a hotel room in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Since midday Saturday, I have driven or ridden 1,600 miles. I’m tired.

I left Epsom as mentioned after writing my last journal entry. Getting out of New Hampshire is slow if you are trying to go east or west. The entire state, as well as that of Vermont, are oriented north to south, following the Connecticut River and its tributaries, not to mention the passes in the White and Green Mountains. Getting from Concord to Albany involves multiple winding two-lane highways through the foothills.

My initial goal had been to pick up my co-pilot Suzy in Buffalo on Sunday. Suzy had been visiting her family in Ontario, and, being in between jobs at the moment, had graciously agreed to split the driving back to the West Coast in exchange for a free cross-country road trip followed by a flight home to the East Bay. On top of that, Suzy is excellent, easy-going company, and our musical tastes are both ecumenical and well-aligned. Suzy is not the type to object to a four hour Genesis singalong. I would have been a fool to pass up the chance to bring her along.

But the New York Thruway is boring and, moreover, I realized on pondering a map of New York State that my friends Christopher and Marina had recently moved to Elmira, which was only an hour’s detour. Amazingly so, given the geography of New York State. Truth be told, I am unsure when our paths will cross again, because, bless them, they live in Elmira, so I decided the extra driving was well worth it.

Greetings, friends. Everything is packed in the truck. Spoiler alert: It all fit.

Also, the Brooklyn Half Marathon is being run as I write this. Naturally, I am not running in it.

Of course, I am getting ahead of myself. Last Wednesday night, I took a red eye to Philadelphia on the first leg of my trip to finish the work of clearing out my mother’s house and packing everything worth keeping into Leto II of the House Atreides, God Emperor of Arrakis and the Known Universe, or Shai-Hulud for short.

The purpose was to meet up with Shipley in Reading PA, see Mastodon & Gojira double-headlining the Santander Arena, then drive to New Hampshire, spend an evening burning my old school papers, and then he would drive home the next day.

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about a few other things that Besha and I encountered in County Clare in Ireland.

First of course was the Burren itself, large as life. Sea creatures leech calcium from the ocean and combine it with carbon to form hard calcite shells. These shells deposit on the ocean floor, and over geological timescales, become compacted into limestone. Continental drift moves these particular massive blocks of limestone north from the Equator and up above the surface of the water, where they become the bedrock of County Clare. Glaciers and rain containing dissolved acids weather the limestone, causing it to cleave in enormous fractures. Then about 4,000 years ago, for reasons to do with climatic shifts and probably human habitation, a bunch of West Clare’s topsoil washed away.

The result is the Burren. Words don’t really do it justice. It’s karst. I love a good karst landscape. The interior of Puerto Rico where the steep sided valleys formed the dish of the Arecibo radiotelescope. The cenotes of the Yucatan. The green hills of West Virginia. Who doesn’t love a good karst landscape?

Greetings, friends! It’s been a couple weeks since I wrote to this journal. I let a slip become a slide. No apologies. Just getting back in the saddle to ride.

The big news here is that Besha asked me to marry her!

Besha had selected hiking the Cliffs of Moher as our activity for her milestone birthday, which was, after all, the main reason for the entire trip. I had been fairly aching to get out there, because we’d been in County Clare for about 5 days by that point, staying in Doolin just a few miles kilometers down the road. We took a day trip to Inishmore and we could just barely make them out through the haze from the ferry on the way back. I even did a training run at the golden hour one evening following a muddy trail along the ocean that climbed slowly up towards the cliffs. I could see them off in the distance! But we hadn’t actually been there yet.

Greetings, friends. Besha and I are in Ireland! Which is partly why I have not been writing much lately. The hard drop after getting home from New Hampshire was the other part.

On that note — we sold Mom’s house in New Hampshire already. The photos were taken on Thursday the 6th, and the house was put on the market the next day.

Saturday morning there was a kerfuffle with one potential buyer over the cellar drainage, which I already wrote about. Another plumber came and looked things over, again, the net result of which was that we decided to simply add the drainage situation to the disclosures, and let the new owners deal with it.

Sunday morning, I turned on my phone as our flight was landing in Dublin, to find a message saying “We have accepted a great offer!” Say what?

Greetings, friends. I wish a chag pesach sameach, a joyous Passover, to all of you who celebrate. Last night Besha and I did a seder at her house, just the two of us, her first.

We used Mom’s antique copy of Arthur Szyk’s beautifully illuminated haggadah for the proceedings, a thing I don’t think my mother herself ever did, although she did photocopy large sections of it to use in rolling her own haggadot, particularly the ones she made to use in authentic 18th Century replica Passover seders.

Because of course my mom re-enacted authentic 18th century Passover Seders, with dinner cooked over the walk-in brick hearth in her dining room. Because of course she had an 18th Century style walk-in brick hearth in her dining room. This is my mother we’re talking about.

Greetings, friends. I’ve definitely fallen off the horse a bit with this journal. I got back to Portland late last Wednesday and just… sort of crumpled.

Some of it was just the weather. I was in New Hampshire from mid-February almost to the end of March. Central New Hampshire had been in the midst of a brief stretch of mild weather, which broke as soon as I arrived and turned into multiple waves of typical New England winter storms. Nevertheless the six weeks I was there was actually long enough to witness the dead of winter trail off into a protracted thaw. By the end of my stay, much of the lingering snow and ice had melted, and it was actually 60ºF and sunny the day I left.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I returned to winter still in full progress in the Pacific Northwest — colder and more overcast than it had been in New Hampshire when I left. I found myself seriously doubting my major life choices for the first time in a long time… which is a sure sign that I’m depressed.

Over the weekend, I found myself so severely depressed, in fact, that even playing Kerbal Space Program felt like too much work. That’s how bad it was. Pretty much all I wanted to do was sit on the couch and watch history videos about the Napoleonic Wars on YouTube.

Greetings, friends. I’m back in Portland finally. The house in New Hampshire is mostly empty and ready for sale.

Today, I want to talk about how we see reflections of ourselves in the lives of our ancestors. This story has two parts, which hinge on the aftermath of my grandfather Sidney’s passing.

I found a box of mementos of my grandfather in my mother’s dresser drawer. There is an academic medal from Seward Park High School for achievement in science. There is also an identity card in his name from the New York City civil defense force, dated 1956. And there is a button with the Red Cross under the words “I Serve”.

When I stop to think about the disaster preparedness training I’ve done in San Francisco, or the disaster recovery work I had the privilege to do in Haiti — there is no mistaking from whence I come by this inclination. The contents of this box from my mother’s dresser drawer make that plain.

Greetings, friends. We’re down to the final phases of clearing and sorting and repacking.

Brian the Liquidator pronounced the barn finished today. He and his crew have filled two empty shipping containers with the refuse from my mother’s estate, wholly aside from all of the items they have carted away for sale or put by the side of the road.

Having finally identified every single object in the estate that I had any interest in keeping, and having suddenly rid ourselves of the rest, the time has come for me to start winnowing it down to what will fit in the pickup truck, and packing it up to get it out of the way of the real estate photography and subsequent viewing.

In fact, I pushed my flight to Portland back to Wednesday to have a little more time to get it all done. I spent a decent part of the weekend sorting through two 18 gallon plastic bins containing a variety of papers from the entire first half of my life, ranging from instructions from Pennsylvania Hospital to the parents of newborns under intensive care, to philosophy essays I wrote in university.

Greetings, friends. In the course of clearing her library, we found a slim notebook, containing a couple dozen pages, filled with our mother’s handwriting.

The title page reads: “Geese and Other Friends — poems by Sharon Ann Burnston.”

I will be honest. Most of these are not good poems. A few are in free verse, the easiest by far of all poetic forms to abuse. More are in genuine blank verse, which is at least a little better, though not much, unless you are Shakespeare or Tennyson.

My mother was neither. While the poems do read with her distinctive voice and diction, my mother was an awkward human being, and many of these poems are deeply awkward. There is one about me, which I have alluded to earlier, and another about Adah, and one about her therapist, that all demonstrate such a questionable sense of personal boundaries that it makes me wonder seriously if my mother had some kind of personality disorder.

Greetings, friends. Yesterday, Brian the Liquidator finished emptying my mother’s house, aside from the few things I asked him to leave behind, and went to work on the barn.

The house feels awkward now, empty, like putting on someone else’s shoes by accident. It is strange to watch what Nat described to me in an email as “this painful task of dismantling 99% of a life's record of existence.”

I am reminded of Rutger Hauer’s final soliloquy from Blade Runner:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Greetings, friends. Happy Vernal Equinox, and a Nowruz mobarak to you all. As I write this, the man called Brian is upstairs with his associates, very loudly destroying the bed that I slept in from the age of about 4 years old to almost 17.

This happenstance was, in some sense, foreordained, from the moment my mother and step-father divorced. There was no world in which my mother, on her own, was going to have the physical or mental health to want to die anywhere but in this house. There was no world in which she would heed our pleas, and deal with her effects before she became too infirm to do so. There was no world in which either my sister or I was going to want to keep a 40 year old small single bed, nor one in which an estate liquidator would have anything like a viable market for reselling it.

So here we are. The bed leaves the house, and our lives, once and for all, as kindling. Sic transit gloria mundi.

But Adah and I have spent a lot of time since November, but particularly in the past month, trying to dispose of our mother’s effects in accordance with what we imagine her final wishes might have been.

Greetings, friends. Today the estate liquidator got started on the house in earnest.

I say “in earnest” because, actually, Brian the Liquidator got started on Saturday morning, so hot was he to trot. He originally wanted to come at 8 a.m., and I was like, hell no, after last week, I am sleeping in. The garage is open, help yourself to the garage.

I padded out to the kitchen to make myself coffee at about 10 a.m., and the garage door was open and I could see that the garage was already mostly empty.

I grabbed a pad of paper and a felt-tipped pen and wrote “DO NOT REMOVE” in large letters, over and over, once per sheet, and took some gaffer tape and started sticking the handmade signs on things. The dining table my father made. The two cabinets in the kitchen with the cast iron pans and all the food I’m still eating and enough dishes and flatware to eat it with. The refrigerator and the stove, so help me God, but not the washer or the dryer.

Greetings, friends. I don’t have time to write a full journal entry today, so instead I will transcribe a handwritten draft of a letter from my grandmother, addressed to a Mr. Rubin Maloff, Principal, Seward Park High School. I found the draft folded up with other keepsakes in my mother’s dresser drawer. It is undated, but I would estimate that it was written in late 1974 or early 1975. I have edited the contents lightly for clarity.

Dear Mr. Maloff:

My husband Sidney S. Burnston (who may be found in your school records as Sidney Bernstein) had made provision in his will for Seward Park High School to receive a grant of five hundred dollars. We are not wealthy people but he felt a moral obligation to return to Seward Park some measure of what it had given him and what it had made possible for him to achieve.

He came to the United States as an immigrant boy in 1921 and was settled on the Lower East Side. His father died in 1924 and it was very difficult for Sid’s mother, left with three young children to maintain their home. She felt it was necessary, ultimately, for her boys to lease school and go to work. They had all held part-time jobs delivering packages to local shopkeepers, selling handkerchiefs at their stops, running errands and the like. But it wasn’t enough. It was a poverty stricken home.

Someone at Seward Park High, learning of the pressure on my husband to leave school, called on my mother-in-law, and understanding the problem insisted that my husband must remain in school to complete his education. To make it possible, somehow a stipend was arranged. it was explained to my mother-in-law that that the stipend of three or five dollars a week would probably be as much as any salary that could be earned at the time (1928 or 1929). There existed in this family a great reverence for education and my mother-in-law was easily persuaded.

In consequence, my husband continued in Seward Park and I believe your records, if they can be retrieved from your archives for January 1930, will show a high scholastic standing, editorialship of the high school newspaper, awards for English merit, particularly in Shakespearean drama, and a young man voted Most Likely to Succeed.

I didn’t know my husband then and these memories may be faulty. I met my husband at Brooklyn College in 1940. He had already been graduated from Seward Park in 1930, had entered Brooklyn College (Evening Session) before the present building was erected, darting around street cars and traffic in the Joralemon Street and Livingston Street area, racing to classes held in scattered office buildings while maintaining high scholarship and working at whatever presented itself during the day. He had been alternately a messenger in a law office, an apprentice in a commercial photography developing factory and occasionally jobless — it was the Great Depression era.

Through all this desperate scratching for a dollar, he completed the course of study at Brooklyn College with honors and awards. The credits listed after his name in the Brocklandian (the evening session graduation yearbook) are as follows:

[omitted: a list of about a dozen extracurricular activities and academic honors]

He continued in Brooklyn College, working toward his Master of Arts degree. It was at this time that I met him. He remained active in Brooklyn College affairs, the Evening Session Alumni Association, the alumni were separate entities at that time. He was editor in chief of the alumni newspaper: “THE ALUMNITE.”

He remained active in school through one means or another. He joined the civil service ranks in the late 1930’s and worked hi way up the steps to Office Manager in the Department of Social Services. In addition he taught adults at night. This delighted him. He taught basic education leading to an elementary school certificate. Later he taught pre-high school equivalent classes in the WIN program.

Through all these years he had maintained his association within his community, he was an award winning synagogue bulletin, he had the honor of being elected vice president of our congregation. His passing was marked by the entire congregation who attended his funeral and the love and devotion shown by our three children and our grandchildren.

So what have I given you here? An overwhelming document full of facts and figures. And where the man? And where the soul and the humor? Where the delight in a well-turned meaningful witticism? Where the endless unfettered curiosity and growth? Despite illness and eventual incapacity due to crippling arthritis, he never stopped learning, he never stopped teaching. Conversation with him was replete with bright facets, with verbal gems which piqued…

Here the letter trails off in mid-sentence, my recently-widowed grandmother probably overwhelmed then by her grief.

So, my grandfather Sidney, having been the beneficiary of a scholarship to allow him to complete his high school education, left a sum of money to his alma mater as a scholarship for some other worthy student in need. Worth about $3,000 today, the bequest wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing.

Greetings, friends. It has been a busy couple days. Yesterday, I finally got to meet the man called Brian the Liquidator.

Before he came over, Adah had solemnly informed me in no uncertain terms that, once Brian looked the place over, any price he offered for the liquidation was based on his ability to sell anything he chose not to junk. Which meant that basically nothing could be sold or given away from that point forward.

“We can’t bait and switch him,” she said. I agreed.

Brian came at bang on 9 a.m., not in a 30 foot high mecha, but a Hyundai Sonata or something similar. I met him outside. He turned out to be a burly, affable Yankee, and surprisingly garrulous. He swept into the house with impressive energy, appraising everything in sight with a practiced eye the instant we entered.

Greetings, friends. Today I want to talk about Mom’s words to live by, and a silver ring.

My mother died while I was en route to New Hampshire. Adah had called me on Friday to tell me that she was fading fast, and that I had better book a flight out. I left the next morning.

My flight landed at Logan airport in the afternoon. I turned my phone on when the aircraft landed. It buzzed immediately with a text from Adah, sent while I was in the air. I knew instantly what happened.

“Hey - I know you are in the air but I need you to know upon landing that she’s really taken a turn for the worse,” she had written. “Please call me upon landing. Love you.”

Greetings, friends. Today I started unpacking the mystery boxes in the barn. I didn’t get as far as I planned, and I want to take some photos of things. So I will write about that tomorrow. Instead, here are a couple personal updates.

Being in New Hampshire is not that great for me, to be perfectly honest. I have a full time job, which is fine, and then on top of that, there is the estate, which feels like a full time job. Subtract time dedicated to cooking, eating, sleeping, and bathing, and there is not much left over.

Which is probably good, because there’s not much here that I like to do in the winter time. I almost bought a pair of snowshoes at Job Lot when I got here, and in retrospect I almost wish I had.

The only really good thing about being here is getting to spend so much quality time with Adah and Keith, but virtually every moment of that is bent on winding up the estate. I have a couple friends I’ve gotten to see here, which is great, but everyone, you know, have lives and stuff.

Greetings, friends. Today we had the second and presumptively final day of the private friends-and-acquaintances estate sale. Four people showed up. Another one or two declined to visit when they learned that the items they were interested in were no longer available.

“This house has too much stuff,” Adah spontaneously remarked a couple days ago, summarizing in a single sentence the central fact of our lives for the past month.

So we have finally reached the point of diminishing returns. The estate sale, such as it was, was exhausting, but it put at least some of our mother’s belongings into the hands of people she knew, people who will appreciate those items of hers they selected, and who might remember her fondly when they use or look upon said objects. Many items we gave outright to people who promised to give them to historical sites for public interpretation.

Greetings, friends. Today I want to talk about hosting an estate sale, sort of.

We’ve had four visits from antique dealers, who offer us progressively less money on each go-round, in a neat and almost startlingly linear decline.

“Too bad you weren’t getting rid of this stuff thirty years ago,” one of them said earnestly. “The kids these days don’t want this olde-timey stuff.”

Well, yeah. That’s why Adah and I are selling it. Tack on the fact that the same dealer agreed to buy a set of hardwood filing cabinets only if I deliver them, and the whole endeavor very quickly ceases to be worth our time.