Chapters
Blog-Style Update on my double-move, hiatus from writing and the transforming of my current life as the daughter of a prolific late artist
Since I’ve begun to write here on Substack as winter made way into spring this year of 2025, we’ve now also passed through summer and into the fall season.
Very much has changed on a personal level and is in the process of yet still transforming. That is not even to directly mention the daily changes occurring also on the world’s stage all the while.
I live here in Northeast Florida, as does my widowed mother. My sons ages 14 and 15 are with me in the way of shared custody. My artist father passed away from acute renal failure and pneumonia in this place, here in the Nation’s Oldest City.
The last home my father knew was and is the rental my mother is posed to vacate by the end of this month, October 2025. The owners are taking over, renovating and adjusting the cost of rent accordingly once it is complete.
I happened to be coming to the end of my own yearly lease with similar timing. It was either retirement home for my 77-year-old disabled mother, or we all apply to move in together to an apartment large enough for my sons to also have their own rooms, finally.
It is on me, almost entirely, to do all of the moving. I completed vacating my own previous rental and am now moved into the new one less than two miles away. I did have my sons’ assistance when I rented a 15’ truck toward the end of September to move the bigger, heavier items.
I definitely pushed my body through a reinjured state one morning when we had the truck rental I tried to beat some incoming thunderstorms. I moved many items by myself from the truck to indoors without physical spotting or support. The boys had worked so hard, I couldn’t bear to wake them so early and with such urgency as it would have required.
In so many ways, I just did it. I made it work. However, the physiology of my body has been tallying this all up for some time now.
We do have a storage unit, and that is where the entirely of my father’s artwork is being held, for now. Even his ashes are there—which seems an odd place to let him be at rest… but my logic is that he would have wanted to be closest and amongst his life’s work, especially if his ashes do not yet have an official urn to house him.
The painting completed from my father’s time being directly mentored by his college art teacher—the one which I’ve most recently written of and one of you single-handedly helped me to attain from Ebay—is already hung in our new living space, above a chair Bill Mix would have enjoyed. Eventually an urn will stay nearby to hold him at rest amongst us.
I would like to create a small shrine to him there, but ultimately, I dream of one day owning a plot of land just so that I might create an entire mausoleum. I can’t imagine what else I could do with such a prolific collection of his drawings, his works, his studies, his oil paintings… all the pieces of him left behind to be discovered by some future anthropologist after this place is long-covered in the sediment of eons and the ages of planet Earth yet to unfold.
It’s a pipedream, this mausoleum. However, my father wasn’t just an artist. He was a documentarian of history and his impression of human civilization as it occurred to him through his lens and lifetime.
I feel much of what he documented through his art is being disassembled, omitted, rewritten, or reversed entirely during this current landscape we are all experiencing, regardless of the perspective each of us might align best with.
In the early 1990s my father and mother once participated in a time capsule event at Fort Christmas, Florida. This idea intrigued him even though we hadn’t return years later for the denouement of revealing the capsules, again.
Perhaps the best use of his work is just that. To make a time capsule from all the bits and pieces which came from his hand to paper and to canvas. I can imagine rolling them all up one by one and sending them far into some cavern or deep core of earth: For whosever should find them from the civilization to rise again after ours goes extinct might be in awe as though they are akin to cave-drawings from our epoch to the next. Or along the same lines, perhaps I should send a few into space to become meteors and have some sliver of a chance to land in some other far-away galaxy.
I am getting away into fantastical thinking, now. And that's ok. It would be poetic, at the least, to ever put those ideas into action. Just maybe I will… to soothe my own soul. To bring some ritual to my father’s memory. To give him a memorial from me worthy and reflective of the effort he put into the art he created day after day.
Back to current reality, though…
I am now working to move all of the belongings out of my mother’s rental. She’s been there for 14 years. Even the relics of my sons’ early childhood play days are still there, practically frozen in time in her garage.
Yesterday I moved some small furniture out of her living space and dragged it to the curb. My lumbar spine telling me, “no,” all the way… I’ve got to do these things anyway. It has to be me. That is, the mental and emotional labor is also mine to experience. The purge of chapters come and gone through that space must make its way out by my hands, by my effort—especially so, also, because my mother is not physically able to do any of the heavy lifting anyhow.
Her new daybed-style trundle has been delivered to the new apartment. It is absolutely so heavy in its box I could hardly finagle it in our new front door, and it will certainly need to be constructed by me before long. Her mattress will be delivered in less than a week and we can officially move her over from her old rental to reside in her new master bedroom.
I also have a small master bedroom on the other side of a split floor plan near to my sons’ new rooms. I gave my older son my old queen-size bed until I can afford to get him a mattress. My younger son kept his old twin memory foam for now on one half of a bunk frame from our old apartment. I am sleeping nightly on the couch cushions I salvaged from the couch we’ve used but now discarded after 8 years with us. I do have the other twin bunk frame to strategically place the surprisingly supportive couch cushions (which are also zippered into an allergen protector).
We all have different sleep needs, the boys and me. I am holding out to get the mattresses for us three which I feel so strongly are best, without chemicals or the potential for off-gassing over time and varied firmness for each of us. I intend on getting us all twins, but if there is anything I feel is important to invest in for better health at this time in our lives it truly would be a quality organic mattress for each of us. We will make do with what we have until we get there. I will make it happen.
I care deeply about our continued good-health and a natural return to homeostasis—especially so after coming from an environment which became inconspicuously ridden with black mold at most 6 months after a water intrusion occurred this past, early February.
About two weeks ago I moved a large IKEA cubical bookshelf away from a wall in my efforts to vacate my previous rental, only to find a large puddle beneath it. All along the baseboard behind… black as a black hole kind of mold concealed since February by the structure of that previously very full bookshelf.
Five days’ worth of industrial-grade de-humidifiers and blowers in that space in 6 months ago unfortunately did not dry up all the moisture, and that puddle is just what I was able to see with my eyes as evidence.
However, just a couple weeks before the bookshelf revelation I began to notice the exterior wall of my old apartment where my previous bedroom and bathroom were on the opposite side of had begun to bleed water, leaking every day into my apartment hallway. I alerted maintenance and apparently there was some rogue moisture/leakage underneath of the apartment, itself. Coming from where, exactly? I’ll never know, because I am most certainly out of there. All I do know is they were set to come in and rip up the entire bathroom floor after I turned in the keys.
So, all along this move, my immune system seems to have become compromised.
About two weeks ago I had to disassemble that bookshelf in order to properly discard it. Then, about a week and a half ago I woke up with that old familiar feeling in the back of my throat that some virus had taken aim.
One of my best friends, ever, had come into town that week to visit and help me find necessary furniture solutions at local thrift stores. I believe we went through six different thrift shops in one day. I was able to reunite with an incredible loveseat I had seen previously and was still in the Alpha-Omega shop here in St. Augustine.
If it hadn’t been for Nora and her trusty van, we would not have been able to take the store up on the 25% off the original price I had seen weeks before. I believe I paid $40 for a wonderful piece that fits so beautifully into our new living room area.
On the Friday after our thrifting comings and goings, I woke up with a old familiar feeling in the back of my throat. Always it is my uvula, there, that is the very first sign that a virus has compromised my immune system.
It had been two and a half years without even any sign of a cold—and as an Uber driver, no less! Something indeed was about to take hold of me. By nighttime that Friday I had hot and cold chills, likely a fever, definitely going down for the count.
I ended up with pharyngitis. Even lost my voice for a couple of days last week. I sounded like a cross between Mickey Mouse and a turkey—No offense to turkeys or the mouse.
Was it the mold? Was it that I have been pushing myself beyond my daily limits to make all the moving parts happen about this double-move? That is my theory: Really, a combination of both.
Let’s face it, I have not been able to work driving Uber during this move.
It’s all been on me, and if I had been focusing on driving for income (sometimes more than 12 hours each day in my car) during these tasks at hand, I most certainly would not have been able to meet the deadline of vacating my old apartment.
And now the second leg of this move is upon me. My sons have left again and I must get things done. Whether I can do it all or whether my body imposes for me to rest… It all absolutely must be done.
This part of our move is not nearly as straightforward as it might seem in just the simple mentioning of it. And once it is done, it is immediately back to the road for me to get the financial wheels turning once, again.
It is ok. This is the work the Universe has cut out for me with patterned youth scissors in exactly the circumstances of what seems to be differently colored construction paper for each and every turn.
It is what it is. We have a place to live. I have my health. My kids are thriving in their own, unique ways. My mother is alive. We are excited for a new lease on life during this chapter. Though this doesn’t mean it won’t be without complexity, I remain optimistic for the best outcome.
For me? That best outcome would be coming back into a place in my life when and where my central nervous system feels safe enough to breathe into creation daily. To finally get to know myself again without all the pressure of covering some next bill, without having to leave my innermost reflections to the wayside of what I must do to survive.
What I love right now is how my new bedspace is beneath a window through which moonlight falls upon me softly at night and also casts itself prominently onto my wall from between the vertical blinds behind the head of my sleep space.
I love how I am now even closer than ever before to the sound of the train passing by late at night, in the wee hours of the morning, behind my head, blow the moon.
Oh, how I’ve always loved that sound, so… from different locations living here in St. Augustine over the last 18 years. I can’t quite put a finger on what about it inspires me except for the sensory input that is not too loud, not too quiet. Really, just right enough to notice the particulars of how the sound of a train along its tracks travels to greet my ears in different ways now than in past years living in past places, experiencing past chapters of my life.
And here, now… the train and the moonlight bolster this new chapter for me with even more presence each and every night. They shepherd me back to myself in tandem so beautifully just as though it were always meant to be so at this time.
Perhaps that is just the peace I’ve been seeking… since first noticing the sound of a train at a distance traversing the earth along its tracks, I knew it was one I enjoyed so many years ago when my sons were both in early childhood.
That peace of sensing a full-body and mind slow-down in comparison to the rhythm of some force moving so smoothly, quickly and with momentum to its unseen destination without resistance. That peace of breath. That peace… which goes and comes as though it is all one in the same, right back home to the center of myself; Because, well… It is what it is. And I am who I am. And that is all that truly matters for any of us: the acceptance of not only what is in or out of our lives… but the truest acceptance of who we are at our core… That soul that runs truly, madly, deeply, gently, guidingly through us… which leads us steadily and surely to the next realm, one fine day.
All the Love,
Colleen Noelle