I was often the smallest person in any group, often the youngest too. That age difference changed decades ago, but I am still surprised to discover I am the oldest in a group. I am still often the smallest (my friend Madora is smaller than me, but she’s the only one).

I have fantasized about living in a smaller space at least since our sons became teenagers. Our home requires work and money to remain healthy. Retirement and not having pets has allowed us the time and money to do that upkeep, but it requires more attention than I will be able to spare. I could copy and paste the list of all the upkeep expenses coming for our beach house, but I’m pretty sure that’s a bad idea. Suffice to say that as I watched my father die of cancer and my mother age, I considered how best to handle my own aging.

We watched Belfast last night. I had to confess to my husband that while I knew, in theory, about The Troubles, I had no idea how ugly Protestants had been toward their Irish neighbors who were Catholic. Gary was speechless. (He thought better of my awareness.) And that’s fair enough. When I taught Karen Russell’s short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” I used a Canadian report on First Nations boarding schools because those abuses were by Anglicans. Later in the year I taught A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, which dealt with U.S. Catholic and U.S. interactions with native peoples. Later still, I showed the Australian film Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) concerning abuses of indigenous people.

There’s always more to know. Always things that need doing.

A friend’s young son has begun a campaign to discourage schoolmates from stomping on worms during recess. And then I read in Best American Science and Nature Writing for 2021 about jumping worms. If those worms twitch, they need to be stomped. I’m not sure I could do that.

Some things we just won’t do anymore. Gary won’t go up on the roof any more. He was grateful when the new access door under the duplex was installed with hex screws. He hates hex screws so he’s not going under that building ever again. He’s pretty happy about that. I will never again crawl under our house. I’ve done it a few times, even squeezing under beams just inches from the soil, but that was a very long time ago. I’m done. I’m done with painting ceilings and installing tiles and a few other tasks. We’re done with the hard tasks, and we’re pretty sure that work is coming up that someone else will need to do for us.

My energy is focused on baking bread, which I have done so many times it’s become easy. I can knit a sweater, but that’s never easy, and not cheap. I can weave shawls, which is assuredly challenging work, but I’ve done it often enough it’s like baking bread. I really do know what I’m doing.

I should be writing. I should be drawing. That might happen. I learned how to make Korean-style dumplings the other day.

Learning new things is at the heart, they say, of staying young. Forget staying young because we do not stay young. We age no matter what and worrying about aging has always seemed a terrible failure to me. I want to be respected for my age and experience. Even when I’m dismissed for my age or gender, I know enough to recognize that’s a foolish bigotry. A wonderful woman I knew when I was President of the Cannon Beach Arts Association told me: “The great thing about being seventy is that no one expects you to look young anymore.” I was in my early forties at the time. We both laughed and laughed, and I looked forward to no longer being expected to look young. I had already noticed that as a middle-aged woman I was becoming invisible. But I will be seventy in October and I am not looking young ever again.

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Purchasing the condo was a great project. We had several goals and I had some that were mine alone. We answered a lot of questions once we began spending half our week in Portland. Yes, we can live in a smaller space, in the city, and without a garden. I can bake bread in the tiny oven, even a large loaf. I am a better cook than any of the local restaurants. Gary is good about using the building laundry before we leave. The condo is completely manageable to clean. It is (almost) enough space for us—jury still out about music and books and my fabric and yarn stashes… the loom, the sewing machine, my grandmother’s desk? When we are in Portland, we do not miss things in the house. We miss the sky over the ocean, the ocean itself, the walks on the beach. There is a broad sky visible from every room in Portland too and we enjoy the crow circus. Walking up into Washington Park is delightful, but not quite so wonderful as walking around Hug Point. That four-mile walk is a great pleasure. So far.

In ten years?

We could sell the home that has been in my family for 111 years, but we don’t actually need the money from that sale. It would be nice to pay off the condo, but so far we can manage. I haven’t found a larger place in Portland I like nearly as well, even though I continue looking at Portland real estate just as I have for as long as I’ve had internet.

Wealthy people, the really wealthy people of the world, have professionals to manage their home repairs and to hide their wealth for them. A 2018 study found that on average 10% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product is in offshore accounts where it is hidden from taxation.

Spain and France, for example, hover around the world average of offshore wealth as a percentage of GDP (10 percent) but their wealthiest 0.01 percent hoard 4 to 5 percent of the country’s wealth and put 30 to 40 percent of those ill-gotten gains offshore. Russia, however, was wildly different: Its offshore wealth is equivalent to as much as 60 percent of the country’s GDP and its top 0.01 percent―who hoard 13 percent of the country’s wealth―park about 80 percent of their wealth offshore. That means that as the ruble craters thanks to the U.S. and E.U.-led sanctions, the pain will be felt primarily by everyone but Russia’s power elite, who are holding offshore assets in the West.

—researchers Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman in Vice

Vice suggests that all the massive yachts of the world be seized. Freezing ordinary assets of oligarchs like Putin’s buddies is less effective since “the impact of this is relatively limited because such a system can be bypassed by the use of proxies known as ‘nominees‘  that obscure real ownership of an asset.” Only someone incredibly rich can sail on a 500 foot long yacht, even if their ownership is obscured. The foreign-owned mansions in London and Miami too, I think. Take their shell-concealed assets and put them to better use. (Though, I confess I have never seen the use of cruise ships, much less personal yachts. They are an affluent indulgence.)

Hiding income will never be a problem for me.

Living small is a personal goal. What use have we for four bedrooms used only a handful of nights a year? Two bathrooms? Thousands of books, Tubs of yarn. I’m not making myself small, just wanting to have only what I can touch and enjoy. Why not fewer clothes? Fewer collections and other possessions? A space that fits instead of overwhelms.

It would be nice if I were still smart enough to use my new smart phone. I have photos to share. On my phone. And I can’t convince Google to send them anywhere. It doesn’t recognize my password. I think my backup email account is my old school email and that account was deleted seven years ago by an overeager tech guy who has since been fired. Alas.

Surely there must be a Smart Phone for Dummies book? Surely I will figure this out in time.

not Z, free Ukraine, slava Ukraini