All the spaces created by the fire will be filled.

Speaking with Debra Howell, more on the presence of absence.

Since college, never felt that objects supported me. Fulfilled my needs, made life more comfortable, brought aesthetic pleasure, yes, but never a casonic support. Hence in their absence, I don’t feel that the ground is gone beneath my feet nor that I am lost or unmoored from the world. However, in following from the thoughts above, there is meaning in absence, especially of certain things, and perhaps that meaning comes from thespace that their absence defines.

All the spaces created by the fire will be filled. Now they are being filled reactively, with objects of need and sustenance. Telephones,spices, milk, shoes, band-aids, crock-pots. And I can foresee the next level in which we replace those things that we had come to rely on for the things we love to do. Good knives for cooking, and espresso machine with which to greet the morning. These are the [practical fillings, ones that we know o well and have chosen so consciously to this point, that it is merely a matter of time and cash flow before we replace them.

But the profound part perhaps lies in those spaces that now must be considered anew, to which a conscious choice must be applied as to whether to fill them or not, whether they can indeed be filled, and if so, how?Would we by another wood carving depicting an intertwined couple, one resonant of the Belizean piece we stretched to buy on our honeymoon? This was not a sentimental piece (although it certainly seems that in the writing). We were vaguely ironic about its symbolism, but were genuinely captured by its beauty.Beauty, history, and occasion get so intertwined in some things that it is impossible to unknit their meaning. And so how do you replace it? what did it mean (we never had to think about it and decide, it was enough that it was there, sitting on the shelf over the floor furnace, glowing warmly in its crowd of similar figurines)?

Looking forward it is these spaces, perhaps, that have the most to reveal in their filling, these objects that will end up saying the most about our journey forward.

And still to come, the filling of the house. Furniture,appliances, bedding…all had been assembled collage-like over time, as they could be afforded or as opportunity provided. Will we embark again on a courseof temporal accumulation, or choose to design a new life, one that matches andcoordinates? Will our live gain an overall conception, a codification ordistillation of its narrative, or revert once again to its meandering eclecticways? Is life a picture of desire, or an historical record of having lived?