We are stuffing our lives into boxes, again. It is an odd exercise. The boxes are all cubes, and our lives are rounded.
I counted the number of cities I have lived in for at least a year's time; almost twenty. All of those moves were within the context of living an ordinary life.: school and jobs, all of them. Nothing unusual. This might be the first time we have chosen, without the nudges of work or prospective work, to move somewhere.
Drawn on a map, our travels look like an old-fashioned exercise in penmanship; a sense of wandering circles, something like a slinky following the part of least resistance.
The boxes are well-used, pulled from a stack in the garage.. They are almost a history. Some of the boxes have other people's histories on them, used by other people. I cross out the most recent lists of contents, and intended destinations (cities, storage, sales, kitchen, bedroom, Room 214) and look for an open space, without old, shiny tape, to make new notes. I say, again, "This might be the last time I use this box!".
We are threading a rope through the eye of a needle. (No camels in this house!)
"How is it possible," we have been wondering, "for the realtor to insist that only a splendidly perfect house will sell, and for us to lived in a series of splendidly imperfect houses?" I do not want to hear the answer to that rhetorical question!
Annie Cat thinks that all this activity is a fine idea. She inspect what the difference is when what had been there is now here. Her turn at angst will come when she joins me in the pickup for her first ride across the country. She will resume her normal, curious self when she walks into our next home. She has done that before, and she is an explorer. The only time she almost went stir-crazy was when we moved, for six weeks, into a temporary, twelve-foot wide cottage, on our transition into this house. I knew just how she felt. Our once and favorite dog, Felix, used to jitter with anticipation when he smelled the first scents of Tucson come through the pickup's air vents. Annie's favorite thing, next to cat food gravy, is a shaft of sunlight on the floor. We can promise her that.
There are a lot of promises, ahead of us.
I counted the number of cities I have lived in for at least a year's time; almost twenty. All of those moves were within the context of living an ordinary life.: school and jobs, all of them. Nothing unusual. This might be the first time we have chosen, without the nudges of work or prospective work, to move somewhere. Drawn on a map, our travels look like an old-fashioned exercise in penmanship; a sense of wandering circles, something like a slinky following the part of least resistance.
The boxes are well-used, pulled from a stack in the garage.. They are almost a history. Some of the boxes have other people's histories on them, used by other people. I cross out the most recent lists of contents, and intended destinations (cities, storage, sales, kitchen, bedroom, Room 214) and look for an open space, without old, shiny tape, to make new notes. I say, again, "This might be the last time I use this box!".
We are threading a rope through the eye of a needle. (No camels in this house!)
"How is it possible," we have been wondering, "for the realtor to insist that only a splendidly perfect house will sell, and for us to lived in a series of splendidly imperfect houses?" I do not want to hear the answer to that rhetorical question!
Annie Cat thinks that all this activity is a fine idea. She inspect what the difference is when what had been there is now here. Her turn at angst will come when she joins me in the pickup for her first ride across the country. She will resume her normal, curious self when she walks into our next home. She has done that before, and she is an explorer. The only time she almost went stir-crazy was when we moved, for six weeks, into a temporary, twelve-foot wide cottage, on our transition into this house. I knew just how she felt. Our once and favorite dog, Felix, used to jitter with anticipation when he smelled the first scents of Tucson come through the pickup's air vents. Annie's favorite thing, next to cat food gravy, is a shaft of sunlight on the floor. We can promise her that.
There are a lot of promises, ahead of us.
Comments
Post a Comment