From the before, a thank you

There is a lot you end up leaving when you move, especially like this, trading a whole life for a whole different life. You have to make room. You have to close. The night before we set off, before the full truck and empty house, Husband and I had dinner with favorite friends M. and J. M. and I shared an office when we first started out at school, which I have always thought was quite lucky for me, given his generosity, spirit, and overall awesomeness. He makes everyone around him feel valuable and full of verve. Also, jolly. I have so appreciated his friendship and stories, and I watch on in awe of his work ethic and utter genius. J., his wife, manages to be lovely, determined, sincere, and kind all at once. Beautiful! She is the kind of person you want with you in a fight, who would scold you thoroughly afterward and then take you out for coffee or something stronger, and save you all over again. I have no idea how she does this with such grace, but I'm terribly grateful that we spent our last evening with her and her husband. We passed around plates of deliciousness and caught up and laughed and said goodbye. I have no idea what we talked about. It was just dinner with friends, only not quite. For me, it was warm and final and fitting. Something like closure, if closure was a scarf you wrapped around your shoulders and took with you, that you could hang on any hook, anywhere, and feel peace.

The Set-Up

My husband and I are moving for the third time in four years in five short weeks. So far, I have sixteen boxes packed. Six of these are tequila boxes donated by an elementary school. Husband and I are not sure why schools always seem to be using liquor boxes or how the schools get them in the first place, but they are the right size to fill with books and still be light enough to lift, so we are lucky.

There are nine file storage boxes (a gift from my lawyer father the last time we visited) waiting to be assembled in my dining room, and an unknown number of broken-down boxes in the basement from the last time we moved. Husband warns that some of these are moldy and/or have suffered water damaged. Just like us, I say. He laughs, even though we can't quite explain the joke.

There are two of us to pack up the house, though Husband is working full-time this summer, teaching music and art at the migrant education program in another town, so that mostly leaves my one set of arms with one roll of packaging tape, and the hundreds of things and forgotten things in the six or so rooms of our little bungalow. Plus the basement. Also, the garage.

There will be one moving truck, two hand-trolleys, and eight packing blankets in our driveway in exactly thirty-nine days. This blog is about how we'll manage to pack all our boxes before then. This is about how many dishes will fit inside a box that once held reams of paper. This is about how lonely empty bookshelves look in the glow of a lamp and the smooth satisfaction of spackle in a nail hole. How I'll find someone to buy our washer and dryer. How Husband and I don't talk about now or moving day, but what our lives were like before and what they might be like in six months. How sometimes we get angry. How we get grateful. How we'll decide what to take with us and what to leave behind, and what happens when we stop counting.