I am abysmal at sorting and packing. What I end up doing is LOOKING, instead of turning into a packing automaton, filling boxes as if I were some assembly-line robot. Maybe it's just that I am too attached to all my stuff. Just this weekend, I read in the Washington Post magazine a first-person article on hoarding. (It was written by the guy who moderated a Creative Non-Fiction workshop I took several years back, so of course I had to read it..) What he was told by the experts was that the hoarder looks at his or her 'stuff' as a second self; that throwing things away diminishes himself.
Well, that may be true, because all my things added together DO comprise a pretty good self all by themselves. If you analyzed the contents of my desks and cupboards and drawers, you'd have a fairly accurate picture of who I am. Frighteningly so. There are dishes. LOTS of dishes. I like dishes; so much so that I have 5 sets of china and a double set of the same ironstone pattern that I bought before we were married. Can I help it that my mother-in-law liked the pattern too? Placemats and napkins and candles. I might have fewer of these if I didn't hate ironing so much. But tablecloths require ironing, as do napkins. So much easier to run out and buy a new set of placemats/ napkins at the Crate and Barrel outlet up Duke Street if we're having company. They tell me the 'bare table' look is becoming fashionable. YES!!!
Another telling observation is that there is almost no item of which I have only one. Good things come in threes around here, or multiples thereof. If one candlestick is good, six is even better. Maybe this reflects my insecurity--the fact that I always need a backup in case something goes wrong. Or maybe it's my aesthetic sense. I like the look of odd numbers of things, but almost all stuff comes in pairs. Whatever. Suffice it to say that my house right now looks like an explosion in a box factory as I inventory my life, drawer by drawer.
We took a dispiriting trip to the storage space yesterday as well. In order to hang all the framed pictures, prints, maps, posters, collages, etc, that we have accumulated, I think we'd need to rent the Louvre. And reading today in the Times about someone's father who owned a farm and a 30 000 book library, I thought, "So???" I've started waking in the night wondering where my daughter's mummified wedding dress will go, and whether there will be enough room for all my Christmas stuff, and what would they do to me if I just shoved all the boxes in storage out into the corridor at the United-Storall and walked away? Perhaps I could do a blind, grab-bag garage sale...tell the movers to deposit all our boxes (except the books, of course) on the brick patio of the new house, throw wide the gates, and sell the sealed boxes for $20 a pop. Cash, and most emphatically, CARRY. Who knows what treasures people could walk off with? And if I haven't unpacked these boxes from the last move (or maybe the one before) I obviously don't need the contents. Even I don't know what secrets they hold.
Retirement plan: Learn to use e-Bay and sell everything.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Sort of
We are about to enter the next phase of messing with real estate. As soon as all appraisals are in and all systems are go, as soon as we pass the brief but distressing "Omigod, what have we done?" period, once we have reached the conclusion that we have no more control over the situation than Indiana Jones had over that boulder that was gaining on him...we arrive at the packing stage. Known in our frequently-moved household as the "where-the-hell-did-I-put-that?" phase.
After our first couple moves, I came to the realization that, in every transfer of household goods, something disappears forever. I now figure that it's sort of a sacrifice to the gods: a gift of appeasement so that our moving truck doesn't drive off a cliff, or spontaneously ignite. I imagine that somewhere in the dark and spooky depths of every moving company, there is a shrine, decorated with the objects that somehow escaped from the truck: a sort of 'Island of Lost Toys' with no benevolent Santa to rescue them.
In an attempt to minimize those escapees, I always engage in my personal favorite exercise in futility. I plan. Yes, I am one of those people who measures rugs and furniture and has even been known to tape out furniture footprints at the new house to assure myself that certain pieces will fit. I figure out ahead of time where everything will go--and try to color-code my boxes and furniture to match the color-coded rooms in the new house so that the movers will know (even if I and my clipboard are otherwise occupied) where to deposit the items they are unloading. In the interest of sanity preservation, boxes are labeled with approximate contents. Anyone who has dealt with mover-labeled boxes will understand. Once you have opened a box labeled "DR dishes" only to find a lone stray saucer and the contents of your under-the-kitchen-sink cabinet, you tend to distrust those packers.
In this move, however, we are emptying not only our current house, but the storage space containing the detritus of past moves: all the stuff that didn't quite make it through these doors, but was deemed worthy of saving. A new chandelier that was never hung. An incredible number of cane-back chairs (which apparently multiply like rabbits in storage spaces). Boxes and boxes of books, labeled with their room of origin three houses ago. Christmas decorations that migrate in and out each year, along with the everyday decorative items they have supplanted. Forgotten treasures, like the half-moon mirror that used to grace the sofa wall of our family room--when we HAD a family room. I am forced to remember not only the contents of our current rooms, but that of past houses--and then map those boxes to new rooms in the new place. Complexity--and possibly chaos--reigns.
And yet, I keep at it, poring over the floorplan (whose dimensions are at odds with the property description on the same page of the brochure) and trying to imagine colors and locations and sizes of rooms and windows and doors and built-ins, so that I can integrate our pieces into the plan. I despair of ever fitting all the boxes of books onto the shelves available, of ever clearing all the virtually inaccessible corners of this house and then finding space for what I discover there. I wake in the middle of the night, asking myself questions about hoses and shut-off valves and where to put the trashcans.
It is--in short--the typical interim period when we can't get out of the old house or into the new, when all there is to do is worry that something will go wrong with one or both transactions. Planning and all the rest of it keeps those fears at bay. After 37 years, after all the moves we've made, all the deals, all the paperwork, all the agonies of waiting during that time, we sort of know that it will probably work out. Key word: "sort of". Sufficient to the day is the worry thereof.
By Fourth of July, we'll be...somewhere.
After our first couple moves, I came to the realization that, in every transfer of household goods, something disappears forever. I now figure that it's sort of a sacrifice to the gods: a gift of appeasement so that our moving truck doesn't drive off a cliff, or spontaneously ignite. I imagine that somewhere in the dark and spooky depths of every moving company, there is a shrine, decorated with the objects that somehow escaped from the truck: a sort of 'Island of Lost Toys' with no benevolent Santa to rescue them.
In an attempt to minimize those escapees, I always engage in my personal favorite exercise in futility. I plan. Yes, I am one of those people who measures rugs and furniture and has even been known to tape out furniture footprints at the new house to assure myself that certain pieces will fit. I figure out ahead of time where everything will go--and try to color-code my boxes and furniture to match the color-coded rooms in the new house so that the movers will know (even if I and my clipboard are otherwise occupied) where to deposit the items they are unloading. In the interest of sanity preservation, boxes are labeled with approximate contents. Anyone who has dealt with mover-labeled boxes will understand. Once you have opened a box labeled "DR dishes" only to find a lone stray saucer and the contents of your under-the-kitchen-sink cabinet, you tend to distrust those packers.
In this move, however, we are emptying not only our current house, but the storage space containing the detritus of past moves: all the stuff that didn't quite make it through these doors, but was deemed worthy of saving. A new chandelier that was never hung. An incredible number of cane-back chairs (which apparently multiply like rabbits in storage spaces). Boxes and boxes of books, labeled with their room of origin three houses ago. Christmas decorations that migrate in and out each year, along with the everyday decorative items they have supplanted. Forgotten treasures, like the half-moon mirror that used to grace the sofa wall of our family room--when we HAD a family room. I am forced to remember not only the contents of our current rooms, but that of past houses--and then map those boxes to new rooms in the new place. Complexity--and possibly chaos--reigns.
And yet, I keep at it, poring over the floorplan (whose dimensions are at odds with the property description on the same page of the brochure) and trying to imagine colors and locations and sizes of rooms and windows and doors and built-ins, so that I can integrate our pieces into the plan. I despair of ever fitting all the boxes of books onto the shelves available, of ever clearing all the virtually inaccessible corners of this house and then finding space for what I discover there. I wake in the middle of the night, asking myself questions about hoses and shut-off valves and where to put the trashcans.
It is--in short--the typical interim period when we can't get out of the old house or into the new, when all there is to do is worry that something will go wrong with one or both transactions. Planning and all the rest of it keeps those fears at bay. After 37 years, after all the moves we've made, all the deals, all the paperwork, all the agonies of waiting during that time, we sort of know that it will probably work out. Key word: "sort of". Sufficient to the day is the worry thereof.
By Fourth of July, we'll be...somewhere.
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