A GREAT SADNESS

...has descended. Big time. I figured it might be coming, but wasn't prepared for such a terrifying feeling of--islolation. Aloneness. Is that a word? People say how sorry they are, for about a month, and get on with their lives, quite rightly, but here I sit, still, cataloguing, scanning, photographing, wrapping, boxing. The days aren't too bad but the evenings are complete shite. Not that I want to be out dancing and partying back in London or even Suffolk, I just want--someone to be here. Someone to do this with me. Who's good at it. As good as I am (am afraid this means a female, should any guys be racing into their cars). Just to have someone here to say fuck this for a game of darts, let's open the Whispering Angel (a lovely rose), would be fabulous.  

I am merely going through a temporary crisis of feeling sorry for myself, and I will get over it. It has all just been too too much and not been helped by Verizon (am writing the CEO) making life impossible by not only canceling our internet by mistake but making me hang on the phone for 2 hours about 12 times a day to talk to Chad in Omaha, flash asshole Brian in Springfield Mass, and Josephe Estarlio in the Phillipines. Yeah yeah yeah, life's trials, we all go through this, but am on my own here and have had three meltdowns in two days and wishing I weren't an only child and could get on with projects I'm good at (dinner, labeling  scanning, wrapping, organizing, burying ashes in cute boxes) while my siblings tend to the hard stuff like filling out forms and sticking pins in a Verizon doll and selling the house and...

I have filled out Treasury Bond Form 3556, wrong, now, 3 times. I'm starting to hate my father for taking out these fucking bonds that are a HUGE palaver every time one matures, getting the form stamped ($10 bank charge) and every single time, no exaggeration, some 12 year old from Treasury Securities whatever in the midwest rings me to ask why my name on the bond is not exactly the same as the one on my bank account and every single time I have to send copies of my marriage certificate and...

Berkshire Bank has mistakenly cancelled our online banking, even though I went in there specifically last week to make sure they didn't, to put my name on it...

I am now resigned to making almost no money on the sale of this house because of where it is instead of 20 miles down the road in trendy flashy Lenox or Stockbridge. All the realtors, bar two, do their best to make me ashamed that the house happens to be situated HERE, bordering on boondockland, like this is my fault. Like as well as clearing 50,000 tons of stuff I should hump these great grey stones down the down and re-erect this place closer to Tanglewood. Have pretty much decided on which of the 7 realtors I've seen I'll sign with. Sothebys can take a hike. Ditto the one that never follow-up emailed to say what a joy it was meeting me. Ditto the one who sat like a lump having coffee at the counter at the General Store saying Gosh, I wouldn't care for your job in a million years (meaning clearing Peg and Odd's house) and didn't hold the door open for me when I was trying to get out with seventeen hundred boxes. Ditto the one who's never sold a house for more than $200,000. And the one who came in flip flops.

Still, the Terminex Man came today. Scott. Seems Peg had a contract with them to spray for mice and spiders and fuck knows. I later ran into him in Wal Mart where I went to buy bubble wrap but got distracted passing Women's Clothing and thermal long sleeve shirts for $3.99. It's starting to get cold here. Am sorry Scott saw me buying clothes in Wal-Mart but it was nice to be able to say Hi to a familiar face.

I'm so lonely. As I said.

This whole experience has made me think rather more deeply than I ever planned on, about the meaning of friendship. Bear with me. You have friends when you're little, and then growing up, and then you move on to the college lot, then the work group--the ones before you got married, and then kept, after marriage, because they were the real friends, the true friends, even after you moved thousands of miles away, they were "the real ones". 

You then make friends with your child's friends' parents because you have to, although one or two genuinely wonderful ones sneak in there to to add to your list.

And then, through chance, or in my case, a deliberate move to seek and find, you hook up again with the friends from growing up, the ones you knew starting at age 5  and managed to keep all through high school--and you are stunned that even though you lost track of them for years, you find that everything you liked about one another back then still holds true today, and, if you are really lucky, as I have been, you find that you love who your friends married as well.

And then, just when you think you have more friends than any one person deserves in a lifetime, you move house, you move to a different part of the country, and to your astonishment, you discover new friends, equally wonderful, and you just know they are going to be your friends for life, along with those first ones from your childhood. And suddenly, the "work" friends, the "real ones", the ones you thought you'd have forever and ever--you start to not hear from. A few exceptions, naturally but very few. Life takes over. Everyone gets older. You live different places. You gradually lose touch. The trouble is you expect to hear from them, are sure you're going to hear from them, but--you don't. (Of course, maybe they never really liked you from the start, there is that to consider.)

Well, fuck it. Too bad none of my friends, wherever they are, however they feel about me, live in Becket, is all I can say. Some friends you've tuned out to be. Just when I needed you, too. I'll shut up now, and go empty the 12 million cans of Campbells Cream of Celery Soup and other goodies from the pantry shelves and box it all up for the food bank, which is "where the old Amway store used to be" everyone says, like I know where this is.