"Memories of Moving"

by John H.
2001.08.06

I recently moved. I've learned from my experience that I greatly under estimated the amount of stuff I had.  You can quantify the number of couches and chairs, but it's the "other stuff" that you have thrown in your closets that I really couldn’t get a handle on.

After all the big stuff was gone, I had to go into my room and pack away all my stuff.  I started going through boxes, at first to see if I could condense the (many) boxes.  But as I was going through my stuff, I found that every thing I touched had some sort of memory attached to it.  And it took me hours to go through it all. In fact, I had to take a break because the memories were coming so clearly that I really wasn’t accomplishing anything except being sentimental.

That old saying about someone’s trash is another person’s treasure, that saying held so much truth that day.  I looked through all my stuff, and it was basically a bunch of worthless tickets stubs, toys and scarps of paper.  But to me, it all was a gateway into the past. I would look at a picture, and the moment was captured, but the memories of that moment go well before and well after the actual moment that was captured in the picture.

Memories flooded my brain that day. Some great memories, other memories, not so great. I found myself living those memories, and probably spending way too much time in the past.  (And living in the past is never good.) So I basically had to force my brain to fast forward into the present and concentrate on the task at hand.

So I got all my crap moved, and now I'm living at home.  I haven’t lived at home for over a year now. This living arrangement is only temporary, but the whole process of moving back home gave me mental humility.  It made me realize that I still do depend on my parents a little (even if it is only for a month).

Living at home for almost a week now, I realize that my parents have hung on to the person they knew when I was 18. I'm 24 now, and the differences between myself at 18 and myself at 24 are too numerous to mention.  But it's funny having to disprove a lot of the prejudices they still have of me.

That’s enough for tonight... you’ve endured way too much already.