7 am. Sons of Scotland alarm just went off.
I have already been up for 45 minutes.
It’s finally moving day.
I’m packed enough to allow myself to sit at the keyboard and type. Oh how my fingers have itched. How my mind has wandered whilst wrapping trinkets and glassware in newspaper and I totally meant to write that down. I didn’t.
The light was wrong in my room when I opened my eyes.
Everything was wrong. My canopy is down, probably not going back up. Curtains are in the wash, probably not going back up either. Maybe on the porch…maybe.
I had a wall of mirrors. I gave them all away except the one that reminds me of my Nana. Never looked in them anyways. Been collecting them for over a decade. Probably owned 100 at some point or other. Never looked in them then either. When asked why I was getting rid of them I simply replied “I am tired of moving them”. I am. I’m tired of keeping them clean. Really, I’m just tired. A lot of them have been with me since the farm. I’m not that girl anymore.
Time for a new life.
I realize moving isn’t the answer. But it kinda is. The catharsis of downsizing. Throwing away bits of the past I have been carting around from house to house. I have lost track and I don’t have time to count just now but I’ve moved at least once for every year I have been on the planet.
When I pulled up to the farm in a U-Haul with my now ex-husband he said ‘you never have to move again.’ that thought and those words filled me with a lightness I had never felt before. And then I moved out 4 times in 7 years and then there was the time I moved and never looked back. I’ve tossed most of what I had accumulated during farm life. He left the one piece of furniture I couldn’t move alone, outside to get warped by the weather. It is a dresser that was my changing table as a baby. It’s been with me forever. I have lugged it to 5 house since it got wrecked and I never did fix it. I’m having the movers set it out with the trash. It’s time to let that go.
“I can’t say baby where I’ll be in a year.” Aerosmith, Sweet Emotion
I mean I can. I signed a lease.
I saw the perfect tiny house for sale in the Hammer and for a minute my gypsy wanderlusting heart sighed and said ‘maybe’. Small, double-bricked, attic space, corner-lot with a fenced yard and a garage. Kinda perfect really. But when have I ever just settled on one thing and decided ‘forever’.
I haven’t.
Giant pointed this out night before last at his house. Said exactly what mi Mami said a while ago…you aren’t getting what you want because you don’t focus on any one thing. I replied ‘oh honey, I am focused. On you.’ These distractions are me doing what I need to do to get by. Both as far as my heart is concerned and my living situation.
I’m working on the book still. It’s been incredibly hard to be away from it for a week while I packed. My life was too expensive for an unemployed writer. My Sunshine showed up in January and stayed. We have made it work in this apartment that was never meant to house anyone but me. Me, my son and my best girl somehow dancing around each other in this tiny house, sleeping beside each other in my tiny bed…I think we got this. She is cutting my bills in half and she really is my sunshine. Bless her.
Therapist keeps asking where I see myself in 5 years. The answer is a pretty steadfast ‘writing books and living in California.’
I have lived long enough to know, the only constant is change.
All I really know for sure is this…I can look back at my life and see this map laid out, with pushpins, post-its, marker marks and areas circled that say ‘you were here’. And it reads kinda like a map of varying fantasy lands. The Swamp of Sadness, the Deadly Desert, Narnia, Wonderland and Oz.
This move is a little different, bigger apartment in the same building. Dedicated balcony bliss. I have been happy where I am. All storms have been weathered without major life interruption, save that one nasty one in February when there was lightning and rain, so much rain. This place was almost perfect, so I am staying close.
Just moving a little East of Eden.
