We are in the new house -- and despite being one of those modern cookie cutter houses, sandwiched in a development -- it does have its charms. Our new address, however, is not one of them. Who would name a street "Babbling Brook Drive" in the desert? An expression of unearned optimism! But there is space for everything, and it will be very comfortable for friends and family once we buy the new bookshelves and extra beds. After three years in a tiny house, it is pretty luxurious.
But the most interesting part about moving may be the shedding that occurs at a new house. I know the correct method is to trim the extra baggage before one moves, but I think you never realize what is truly unnecessary until you open the box and see all that extra stuff against the backdrop of a pristine location. You have not yet discovered the dark closets in which to hide it all. So I have in the last four days thrown away years' worth of papers that really should have been purged ages ago.
I feel a mixture of relief and weirdly enough nostalgia, maybe because those files filled with papers signal mortality -- as in why else did you keep almost thirty years of mortgage paperwork for a house you sold five years ago except to hold on to something tangible from those middle years of owning a house and raising children so as not to admit to having arrived on the threshold of your coming final thirty years?
Perhaps a yearly purging of non-essentials will keep me ever in the present, and the past squared away and tidy, and where a visit will not be overwhelmingly weighty or dusty. I am thinking of moving a lot of pictures and documents into the cloud -- doesn't that sound like the creation of a personal heaven?
