P is for

pain.

I've had a nagging discomfort for the past week: what felt like a periodic light electrical shock in my neck and jaw -- okay, a pain the neck. Then it disappeared on Thursday. Coincidently that's the day I dealt with and finalized some tax stuff I'd been shuffling around my desk for weeks. It would appear that, for me, pain and procrastination go together.

And yesterday I tackled what passes for my inbox. It would be better called my underbox along with its imaginary complement: my out from under box. I tend to stash inconsequential things in the former with the vague promise to sort through them later. When the pile reaches critical mass, I am forced to confront it. Notice that I didn't say there was anything critical in that mass.

Today that box is clear (again) except for three pieces of coorespondence; most of the other papers are sorted but still strewn across my dining table. At least after hours of messy, dusty purging and filling the recycling bin, I'm down to what either stays or gets further weeded when I file or put them into dedicated binders. Each pile represents a category that I can work with and I've already made strides by putting one reference category into its own binder ("...where it belongs.," conventional wisdom says with a weary shake of the head). Better than that, I swapped the small over-stuffed binder for a larger one that was practically empty. Duh.

So, pain-free and making strides, I'm dealing with so much that accumulated here following my mother's death: the stuff of my own life and the additions from hers, some of which have been emotionally burdensome. Slowly I've been going through each item and piece of paper brought back last summer, few of which had deadlines so they've just weighed on me. Add to that whatever of my own that I brushed aside during that time, often because I simply had no energy to cope with it. That's the way of mourning amidst the tasks of everyday living, but I can see daylight in more ways than one. Like my neck pain vanishing, life is feeling lighter now as well.

My thoughts are with those bearing up under the weight of their own losses.

legacy

One of my treasures is a woman's journal from 1879. She begins her entries March 12 and finishes on April 2 the following year. In that she notes that she's leaving on a trip to Philadelphia, having received a telegram requesting her there, and that she will begin another volume the next day.

The pages are fragile, the ink faded to a muted brown, and the binding is delicate after over one hundred years and passing through who knows how many hands. Its hard cover reminds me of the mottled black-and-white composition books I used when I was young, but this is yellow and black. I've had it so long that I can no longer remember where I found it.

This morning on The Writer's Almanac (Public Radio), Garrison Keillor recounted that on this day in 1884 Susan B. Anthony "addressed the United States Congress, arguing for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote." The amendment failed to pass then but was finally made into law in 1920, fifteen years after she'd died. (I am shocked to realize that Anthony was my age when she appeared before Congress.)

I can't help marveling that these two women were in the world at the same time. There's no indication in her journal as to the writer's age, but she refers to a daughter who, I would guess, is probably in her late teens or early twenties. As best I've been able to decipher they lived in Cambridge, MA. I wonder what she imagined for herself...and what she wanted for her daughter.

Today is International Women's Day and I am grateful to both of these women and all who came before leaving their marks however great or small. They worked to gain their own voices in both profound and humble ways, and to give the same to us whom they could only imagine. I'm also aware of those who share the earth with me today. They are the countless women who struggle throughout the world to raise themselves, their families and their societies up from oppression.

I hope that you'll take a moment -- whenever you read this -- to tell just one woman how she has touched your life. She could be older or younger than you, present in your life today or alive in your memory, someone you've never met or your closest confidante. She's undeniably a part of your history and deserves to know.

I also wonder what history will judge to have been my own generation's contribution to the legacy.

kudos

I'm feeling positively virtuous.

Today I finally made a deal with myself: take 30 minutes and go through my videotape archives. That's fancy talk for a small wicker trunk chock-full of taped movies that have moved with me twice.

In the time since I lovingly taped black-and-white and other favorite movies on Sunday afternoons most of them have been immortalized on DVD and are readily available when and if I want to see them again. "Watch" is the operative word. I've been storing -- not watching -- them for years. So today I finally let them go.

I kept a dozen or so personally meaningful tapes, and a handful to enjoy before I let them go as well. This might seem much ado about nothing -- two bulging bags of nothing, but I accomplished two things for myself in that brief time today:

1. I finally took on a task that I'd resisted for years because I valued good movies and thought of mine as a collection. Yes, they were fine films but the videotapes were dusty and degraded by now. I wouldn't have had a storage problem if I'd remembered to value the movies not the tapes. Not to mention that technology has moved on as well.

2. I also stopped holding out for a large chunk of time. I struggle with taking small bites of anything including "to do" lists so this was a tectonic shift for me. Easy for some people, but it's just not my style to move quickly through things other than ice cream. Still, it thrills me that I can change. Well, maybe not the ice cream part, but...

So I'm here to say that even though no one else can tell that my videotape glut is gone, I feel lighter. In some strange way I've been burdened for years by the notion that I really should watch each and every one of those movies again sometime. I should live so long.