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.
