Seattle and Vancouver

I just spent a week in Seattle and Vancouver. In Seattle, I stayed in an airbnb in Fremont where on Sundays there is a wonderful flea market. I picked up a Hawaiian dress there, a dress which made me feel right at home in the lush vegetation and dry warm air of the Pacific Northwest in August. I am wearing it on the beach in Vancouver  (bottom photo). In that incredible city I spotted more dyed green hair, a "thing" I guess this summer (the matching balloons were very amusing), an older woman on the sky train carrying a really cool bag with a picture of Bob Marley (I wish I had a good picture of her hair which had all kinds of Native American beads), and an elderly Asian woman whose leggings captured my attention. In Vancouver I was noticing the stylishness of Asian women who were wearing loose fitting but really well cut clothes.

Saying good bye to Objects

Well. Here it is. The big move. After thirty years in the same house, I am leaving. It is a classic example of the empty nest syndrome. Adults whose children have left the coop either hang on to their big digs in anticipation of visits of the new extended family or they down size.

I am opting for another direction: moving in with a man who already has a house, albeit a much smaller one. Then we shall see.

Moving thirty years of stuff forces you to come face to face with the material bourgeois culture that valorizes objects as a sign of success, power, prestige. I feel none of these. I just want to get rid of them.  Truthfully some have emotional value (I just hugged* a wardrobe good bye, the wardrobe in which my grown children used to put away their clothes when they were visiting or living with me for brief for stints of time).

I will not list the objects that hold emotional value. Everybody has those. I will emphasize rather the bizarre states of emotion one encounters during the packing stage. Looking at the house from a “present” state of mind, really absorbing the moment. Evenings spent outdoors listening to the birds, eating dinner at the little teak table, plates on our laps, sometimes followed by a game of badminton (new this summer, but I want to keep that going for years to come).

Packing objects that I keep for sentimental value: pottery made by my kids at various ages, from the primitive heavy to the more refined. I wrapped my daughter’s clay head in a Tiffany felt bag (what that was holding originally I cannot recall): she looked like she was off to the guillotine, or it was a piece of conceptual art work making some kind of modern day reference to bourgeois decadence (the Tiffany felt bag).

Objects that revive the dead: investigating the origin of a piece of furniture and hypothesizing that it probably came from the Baltimore branch of the family (maybe those famous art collecting sisters); seeing return address labels on old empty cardboard boxes with the handwriting of long dead grandparents; finding my baby quilt hand sewn by my grandmother; placing it in a plastic box alongside quilts I have made, there, the quilts can all talk to each other now.

I have tried to be environmentally conscious with all the things that I have thrown away: paper with clips that I removed or staples that I carefully ripped. The same goes with paper held by plastic. Rip, separate, recycle.

I am angry at Apple for creating packaging that basically glues paper to plastic. Shame on them.

I have held yard sales, brought things to friends, although all that driving probably offsets the recycling through giving. People have taken books, cds, dvds. I held a clothes swap. The auction house has taken away furniture (I thought I was being foreclosed upon when the furniture was assembled on my front lawn). Thanks to these efforts to move objects to other people, I feel closer to my friends, and I have made new friends. I have met people who volunteer their time to load heavy objects (beds) in a pick-up truck and deliver them to a family that needs them. We kept saying thank you to each other. Thank you for helping me get rid of big objects that I no longer want or need. Thank you for giving away these objects that a family badly needs. An infinite circle of gratitude mediated by objects.

In my new home, I want to have less stuff of course. I will have to. Yet, there is a big box filled with toys for small children, because, in case some small children to do come over, I want them to have something to play with. There are old photo albums, framed photos, a metal box filled with old family photos. A few super 8 films (when will I have time to digitize those????). Some pillows will follow me to my new home, but some I must throw away. An old cotton comforter is finally getting a much needed wash before rejoining an old futon which has already been placed in my new home.

A friend is storing more glassware than I would ever need along with furniture that I am keeping for my children when they have a home for it. I decided to keep a walnut secretary that came from my grandparents’ North Carolina house and a big heavy mahogany dresser whose origin is Baltimore, where my father’s family comes from. Objects remind us of our origins.

I put away shoes and winter clothes in boxes. I do laundry and see the clothes drying in the sun. The colors cheer me up. I love clothes, perhaps way too much. But they comfort and calm me. They will follow me. I will take good care of them.

Meanwhile, there are “things” that I cannot take with me. At the top of the list, all the perennials that I have taken care of over the last thirty years, the lavender that finally took off at the base of the granite wall that was built by an early man in my life (can’t take the wall either), the cairns that I have built all over the place (I could take one I guess), the lilac bushes that grew from tiny little shoots, the peonies (I’ve transplanted a few), the delphinium (flattened by bulldozers when the new septic was put in).

I can take memories with me, and I anticipate that, for many years to come, I will have dreams of this place where my children grew up, where a post-modern family (that included a gay housemate and a twenty something daughter not to mention my new guy and his autistic son) emerged from the ashes of two dissolved marriages.

And then there were the books. Moving books is herculean. They are heavy, and it doesn’t take that many to fill a box. I had to part with hundreds of them. I ended up donating them to the local used bookstore (Left Bank Books in Hanover): the owner makes house calls! Then what was left went to individuals who came to my house and picked them off the shelf. The rest went to local libraries. Each time I went up to the big bookcase to pack more of them up, I would save one or two for my family and me (an eclectic mix, from nature books for children for my stepson to a biography of Marie-Antoinette, especially after the guy from the auction house kept mistaking a portrait of Louis XVI for Benjamin Franklin), a book by Freud, a book by Bourdieu, a dictionary of film terms in five languages (you never know when that will come inhandy, and they happen to be the five I have familiarity with), a book of mythology filled with illustrations. Books organize information in a way that Wikipedia could never do, unless you treat all of Wikipedia (a bit like the universe, no “all” there, right?) like a gigantic monster of a book.

I am not one of these people who claims to “love” books. I like to browse, yes, and French bookstores really know how to create an environment in which you want to stay for a couple of hours, the way in which they stand up key books that announce a particular argument or theme, and then lay flat other books running along similar lines. But I am afraid for the future of books, as many of us are. Do they mean the end of intelligent, curious, reality questioning humans?

Overall, I’ve been very fortunate to have the time to do this move without worrying about the 9-5 day job that I do not have, although it’s been on the hot and humid side. I’m also fortunate to have friends who show up and take things, move things, and sit and relax under the tree and take in the last days with me.

I tried giving everyone I know one object that I thought they might use or at least like. Books, utensils, clothes.  I gave a friend who is a caterer a big salad bowl I had never used, the rest of my liquor to a drinking buddy, a string of pepper shaped party lights to a friend who throws great parties, hiking maps to friends who…hike.

My guy friend has been calm and resolute, getting his house ready for my mountain of things. He repainted the room that will be my study and turned an attic space into a walk in closet. He moved my many bookcases into his living and dining room, and to make space for them, in turn, cleaned out many of his things and his sons’ things that were no longer being used.

In the kitchen, we combined cookware and dinnerware, and, much to my amazement, his one plastic funnel and my two complimented each other perfectly in size. I saw that new trio of funnels, nicely nestled together, small-medium-large, as a metaphor for our complementarity.

When it came time to merging our fine china, I came across a collection of egg cups, which I only found after I’d put mine away in storage. Oh well. I have plenty of other small knick-knacks that can keep his egg cups company in the glass door bookcase that is now in his dining room.

Life goes on, with or without or with someone else’s…egg cups.

* hugging wardrobes is only one of many unexpected new emotional responses I have had during the packing process.