settling in

Well, I’ve moved. Luckily, over the past few years I have been down-scaling and down-scaling to the point where this last move took two hours start to finish. Now I am faced with the unpacking.

It’s funny how you move your things-furniture, pictures, tchotskes-to a new place, and there you are-- home. This time it was a bit different, since I had already spent so much time up in the attic room that is now my office/the guest room that it felt like home instantly.

We were just up there for an hour or so with a friend, and she and D were sitting on the bed talking as I was unpacking boxes and showing them odds and ends from my distant and not so distant past. The picture of me in a mini-skirt and long hair at fifteen is always a crowd pleaser.

My passport photo from 1981 when I was off to Amsterdam to play with a salsa band for three months. My collections of cigar boxes, marbles, and colored glass ashtrays. And lots of old photos.

Remembering all of the things that have gotten left behind in all of my numerous moves over the last ten years makes me sad, but the happiness I feel now is worth it. As my mother said when she moved out of the house where she lived with my father for 42 years to move to a retirement community, “It’s just things.” Yes, those things represent memories, but the memories will just have to live in my mind, as there isn’t enough room to cart it all around with me.

So we are now in the process of blending two lives, households, and creating memories of our own. And to borrow a phrase from that witchy woman I live with, “I’m for it.”