This month, one of the topic choices the members of my local writing group gave ourselves was “Write about a time when you moved from one home to another—the circumstances of the move, how you felt about it, how it turned out.”
The move that came to mind first was the most traumatic one of my life, when I moved across town—and into a new school district—right before the start of junior high…but I remembered that I had already blogged about that, years ago. If you missed it, you can read “Junior high, mean girls, and Campbell’s soup” here: https://www.amywchapman.com/p/junior-high-mean-girls-and-campbells-soup
So here’s what I wrote instead:
On one hand, I haven’t moved into a new home since 1989. That’s the year Tony and I got married, and the year I moved into the house in Locke’s Mills he had bought a few years earlier. That move was only a distance of about eight miles—no moving van required, just lots of loads in the trunk and back seat of my car and a few in Tony’s Bronco, including a couple of trips towing a small utility trailer.
On the other hand, I move each and every year—not once but twice, in May and again in September. That move, back and forth to camp, is only a distance of three miles, and while I may not have to move tables and chairs and beds and bookcases, I do bring a lot with me. Clothes. Books. Food. Cats.
Like most people I know, I have a lot of stuff, and, also like most people I know, most of it is stuff I don’t need. I have a detailed and recurring fantasy that involves being told that, for whatever reason, I must relocate to Australia, and I have one month to pack everything I really, really need for the foreseeable future and jettison the rest.
Then (because this is my fantasy, and I have no actual desire to move to Australia) at the end of the month, after I’ve pared down my possessions by about 90 percent, someone says, “Just kidding—you get to stay right here, in the place you love, but look how much more organized and spacious it is!”
When I moved to Locke’s Mills 36 years ago, I brought with me—literally—everything I owned, as well as two little kids and everything they owned. If you know our story, you know that Tony and I started dating in late June that year and got married in mid-August, making us, quite suddenly, a busy blended family of five with no time to sort, purge, and organize our respective possessions.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, my new home had a full basement and a big barn, which became repositories for extra furniture—we didn’t need two couches or eight end tables or 16 chairs—as well as unmarked boxes of hastily-packed miscellany that I would occasionally have to rifle through when one of the kids remembered that they had once owned a Magic 8-Ball or a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper or a Muppet Babies video and they needed it right now.
During that crazy summer and fall of 1989, and for quite a while afterward, I lived in the midst of our two households’ worth of possessions without paying much attention to the excess. I remember vaguely that every flat surface in the house was always stacked with clothes, toys, books, and laundry, and that jumbled piles accumulated in the corners of every room, but mostly what I remember from those days was being madly in love, focused on the “his, mine, and ours” family Tony and I were creating, and overjoyed about the new baby we would be welcoming the following summer. The challenge we would face to find room for a crib, highchair, changing table, and stacks and stacks of diapers didn’t really cross my mind, and of course we made it work, mostly by shifting some piles around.
Over the next 20 years or so, I focused more on organizing the stuff we had than on trying to pare it down. Certain that lack of storage was the problem, I installed Shaker peg racks in every room and built no fewer than a dozen sets of shelves—bookcases, pantry shelves, toy shelves, closet shelves.
I made valiant attempts to implement new systems: color-coded bins for backpacks, hats, and mittens; wall-mounted pocket file organizers for homework, magazines, and newspapers; mesh hammocks for stuffed animals; over-the-door hanging racks for shoes. Nothing worked for more than a few weeks, but I kept trying.
Meanwhile, new stuff continued to come into the house. When my mother died, we made room for a few pieces of her furniture and some sentimental items, and stored others in the attic space we had made when we added a room in the ’90s. When a friend undertook a years-long renovation of his old farmhouse and stopped by to offer us a cast-off window, sink, or kitchen cupboard, we rarely said no, and our basement and barn filled with potential materials for our own future remodeling projects.
By the time I turned 50, Tony and I found ourselves with just one semi-adult child still at home. Without a house full of kids to blame for the piles of stuff, I had to face that fact that we were both afflicted with lifelong pack rat tendencies, the result being that what should have been a much emptier nest was still bulging with way too many possessions.
It was about that time that I really started to feel overwhelmed and oppressed by Too Much Stuff, and my fantasy about moving to Australia—well, not actually moving to Australia, but preparing as if I were going—began to take shape. That was also when I realized that our May and September moves back and forth to camp provide a twice-yearly opportunity to take a hard look at my possessions. If I can get along without something for four months, do I really even need it? If I didn’t wear something at all last summer, will I wear it this summer? If I brought that stack of books to camp, and now I’m packing them up, still unread, should I bring them back home, or should they go directly to my town’s new “tiny free library”?
I’ve always viewed New Year’s Day—a time of new beginnings—and my birthday—which occurs at about the time that the spring cleaning urge usually hits—as good times to embark on major decluttering projects. With the addition of two more, I now have four times each year when I resolve to go through the whole house and sort, purge, and organize everything. The older I get, the more conscious I am of what an onerous task my kids will one day have if I don’t get a handle on our excess stuff.
I haven’t perfected my system. There are some years when I’m so excited to get to camp that I almost entirely skip the May sort-and-purge, throw everything I think I might need into reusable grocery bags, and just go. There are some years when my annual September melancholy is so overwhelming that I can’t summon up the energy to sort out the summer clothes I haven’t worn and the books I haven’t read and find new homes for them. And I still fight an urge to view the camp as a convenient waystation for items I haven’t quite decided are expendable, something I learned from my mother, as I watched her pack the car with things that should have been tossed out, and heard her declare them “good enough for camp.”
But now, in my mid-sixties, I’m all about giving myself grace, and celebrating the small improvements. Maybe I can’t go through all of my bookcases and sort all of my clothes this fall, but if I can donate two books instead of bringing them home from camp and re-shelving them, and if I can go through one bin and part with a few T-shirts I haven’t worn in years, I’ll consider it a victory.
Love your writing. Thank you! 😁
Wow, does this sound familiar!