Why Haven't You Come to Visit Yet?

Mid-June Carolee will come to Seoul, and Carolee will stay with ME! 

Do you know that the last time anyone came to visit and stay with me at my house was Christmastime, 2003...and it was Carolee!  To more accurately visualize the timeline, in 2003 I still lived in Germany; I didn't move to Japan until the summer of 2005.

For five years I lived in Japan, and, besides me and the landlords (who lived next door, mind you), only FIVE people ever even gazed upon the interior of my home:  two friends from church who brought me food when I returned from the hospital after my appendicitis, a colleague who lived down the street and rented from the same landlords, and--wait for it--Carolee!  (She spent a few hours in Yokosuka with me when her architecture class "field trip" to Japan was checking out Tokyo, and she wanted to see my house.)  Granted, a serious deficit in available parking curtailed all sorts of regular or spontaneous home visiting during my residence in Japan, and, due to lack of interest and a true absence of skills, I rarely cook; hence, I even more rarely entertain!

Furniture-wise, I downsized dramatically before moving to Japan.  I arrived sans couch, love seat, or dining table.  I brought only one bed, planning to buy another before anyone come to visit.  Well, as mentioned previously, no one came to visit and I never bought another bed!

Until I moved to Korea, that is.  As of last October, I have two beds again.

However, the more grievous issue with regard to a dearth of visitors has been my "denial" rooms.  (At my last abode in Germany, I had a "denial" basement--a true horror of horrors!)  My last four residences have all had at least one room jammed with stacked boxes and sundry pieces of acquired clutter.  I have fully intended to sort and organize and discard as needed for like ten years now.  But the intention has remained highly nebulous without sufficient motivation to fully focus it within the trajectory of my energy.  That is where your visit could have made all the difference at an earlier juncture of the scope and sequence of my life!

Alas, my apartment here in Korea has had two rooms fully arrayed in "denial," albeit, I plead some mercy on my behalf since one of the rooms holds mostly the stuff that usually has lodged in my school classroom.  (This year I just never fully moved into the school classroom, which is just as well, because this week I learned I will change classrooms for next year.)  But, with Carolee's pending visit rapidly approaching, I determined to annex at least one of those rooms into the domain of accessible.  With major chunks of the last week devoted to the endeavor, I have achieved success.

What a venture, though, one requiring a full court press, I must confess.  I have shredded all the financial records spanning the years from my marriage (and I have now been a Cahoon longer than I ever was a Hatch!) up to the most current seven years--which I hope is the right number, and not ten, but I totally succumbed to a shredding frenzy.  I have discarded all the college notes that either Mike or I had saved from our undergraduate years, although I salvaged our more personally creative written endeavors.  I uncovered a myriad of separate stashes of exercises/workout routines ripped from either Shape or Runner's World with an occasional recipe--one that at least in theory I might actually prepare--mixed in.  Those are now properly sorted and stored or else discarded.  I reviewed and repacked my 72-hour-kit.  I culled my travel files, added folders--Japan and Korea, for example--and then catalogued an assortment of stuff collected, at this point, from all the continents except Antarctica! All the random poems and quotes I clip or copy now abide in separate boxes for organization at a later date.  All my own poetry--the first ones written the year I was an English major at the University of Utah--I have collected together in one place for the first time ever.  I also rediscovered the hard copy of the once-begun novel and rejoined it with the file and envelopes of notes, descriptions, and lines written in the interim.  Lots of letters and photographs certainly require more attention, but I know where they are and can access them easily at this point. 

So, if Carolee's imminent visit catalyzed the dismantling of one "denial" room, perhaps another visit by someone else could mean the end of all "denial" rooms . . . at least for me!  Please do come visit any time!