David and I have spent the past week moving into our new home in Massachusetts. My mom drove up from Cincinnati to help us and promptly fractured her foot in multiple places, putting her on the sidelines, while we dealt with expected yet not fully anticipated house drama.
This is our sixth move in almost nineteen years together. Here we are moving into our place in Madison, Wisconsin, in the summer of 2010, right after we finished grad school:
A lot has changed since then (e.g., we now wear shorts of a much more similar length to each other, for one thing).
Tonight, I was thinking about all the things that we moved from California to Wisconsin, and what we still have from that time: our coffee grinder, some cups, a kitchen cart, a desk, a side table, a lamp, a velvet painting of a bridge. Most of our other furniture and decor has been acquired since then.
Moving brings up a lot of questions about what objects are meaningful to me and what objects I hang on to even though I’d rather let them go. Here are some questions for reflections along those lines:
What stuff has stayed with you through multiple moves?
Is there anything that you’ve held on to out of guilt, fear, or overwhelm even though you’d rather let it go?
What’s in the boxes you have yet to unpack?
What things do you take with you rather than trusting them to movers or delivery services?
What’s the first picture or piece of art you would put up in a new place?
How do you define home?
I began my declutterring project around the time of the invasion of Ukraine. I thought: if I had to make run for it with only what I could carry, what would I take with me? If my home were destroyed, what would I miss? Photos, my son’s best childhood drawings. A few books and mementos. My mother’s jewelry, but only because it was my mother’s. Nothing else matters. Decluttering became very easy.