The Things we Moved

The past month we’ve been engrossed in the reality of living here, in our new apartment. But the process of getting here still hovers around, echoing off our still-beige walls, because the process was a bear. It was a mountain. It was doing taxes and planning a wedding and interviewing for a job. It was pure effort. So even though that effort paid off and the plan was realized, the sheer expenditure of effort required to make it so remains around us somehow, in spirit form. For awhile the effort made us physically tired. The night of the move we literally collapsed in bed; both of us face down, with feet hanging off the edge as we lay where we happened to drop. We laughed muffled, amazed laughs into the comforter, because we both knew what the last six months or so had been like. The plan had been fairly radical from the get-go, and the process itself was rife with drama, emotion, doubt, late-night soul searches and the sanding, sawing, painting, clearing and cleaning that’s required to get an old home looking swanky for its potential new owners. That first night, knowing what it had all been like, we really could only laugh. “Wow, that was nuts,” I said. “Totally,” agreed my husband.

For along with the physical aspects of improving our old home, and the organizational aspects of researching, finding, touring and strategizing to get an apartment, came the job of deciding what to take with us, and what to let go.

Minimalism is attractive to me. Clutter causes measurable negative effects: disorganization, frustration, annoyance, distraction, and a general sense of foreboding. I don’t like furniture up against the walls and I don’t like knick-knacks covering the shelves. Space between objects, to me, is no small thing. I can practically see the oxygen flowing around the objects, freely and unhindered, coming straight out into the open where my children and my husband and I can breathe it. It’s no accident that I’ve worked as an interior design writer and photographer: placement matters to me. It matters because it matters: done haphazardly, without apparent thought, it irritates and bothers. Done well, with apparent care, allows for peace.

And yet.

My husband Steve and I married in 2012, in our own version of the Brady Bunch: he with his two daughters; me with mine. Together we had our son. We had both had relatively long previous marriages and we had both lived as single parents in our respective owned homes. So when we bought our home in Ballard together and lived as one family for the first time, we not only merged our families, we merged our households. Into the house went his mattress and my couch. His chair and my table. His pots and my pans. And the rest — a jumbled mixture of five kids’ things and two adults’ gathered belongings, filled up the garage. There it stayed for the next five and a half years. With very busy lives, “tackling the garage” was shunted down the pole of priorities until it hit rock bottom. So when we decided this past Fall to make this change for our family, “tackling the garage” not only flew up the pole; it hit the top. We had to reckon with the sheer mass of stuff which, in our eagerness to simply merge and get on with our lives, we had refused to deal with.

Years ago as a teen I read Tim O’Brien’s “The Things they Carried.” It had a major effect on how I thought about the world, and how I thought about writing. I was fascinated with how the straightforward recounting of one man’s items could so clearly convey the vagaries, violence, difficulties and burdens of war. So when I, as family organizer and list-maker, began the written accounting of what we had and where each item stood in its importance to our family’s happiness, I thought of The Things They Carried. We, too, were responsible for all the things we felt, to date, we had to have. Even though we refused to go through them, I felt the weight of those boxes and bags of belongings out there in the garage every single day for five and a half years. Their very existence took up space in my thoughts and buzzed along in my nervous system. The assumption that the items themselves were so valuable we had to have them, and yet so without value that we never used them, confused and bothered me. What did that mean, exactly? Why have them if we didn’t use them? –The answer couldn’t be simple, because the answer involved the psychology of a family, and more, too, of the fact we were two families who had both separately undergone divorce. Items my daughters used to have in their rooms at their dad’s house, before they came to live with me full time, were in the garage. They didn’t want them in their rooms but they didn’t want them gone. And for me to insist they be gone was far more loaded than simply talking about freeing up space. My husband didn’t feel it was his place to go through his daughters’ old stuffed animals and books and painted clay figurines from their growing up years, either. They had chosen to ask us to hold them, and that, too, meant more than just the fact we had a large garage space: the holding of the items kept a line of care there between my husband and his daughters that he didn’t want to break, or even risk straining.

And yet here we were: risking a breakage of sorts by claiming our stake in our future: we were selling the house. We were moving and making a big enough change for it to matter. By virtue of the fact the apartment was 1/3 the size of our house, we couldn’t take everything with us; not by a long shot. And so we were offloading and streamlining and whittling down and down and down to the very nub of what we felt we needed on a daily basis. I couldn’t wait for the end result of such a severe cutting, and yet I dreaded the process. How to reconcile our current possessions with what we had all gone through while owning them? If I finally donated the side table that I’d bought with my first husband, what would happen? I liked the table, and it served a useful purpose: the latter the paramount consideration in this move. But it was tied inexorably to that time. I still knew which store we’d bought it in (Pier One by Southcenter) and how we managed to do so (a gift certificate from a relative.) Along with the memory came the emotional details my brain held onto in spite of everything: those feelings and thoughts tied to all the many moments from a difficult 15 year marriage. Ask anyone who’s divorced, especially those whose breaking apart was a bloody, bloody cleaving: they’ll tell you those memories don’t go away; not really. After awhile they aren’t lugged up to the surface, hand over hand, anymore. But they float up on their own forever, now and then, tied as they are with those infinite ropes of before.

This tackling of the things in our garage became not just a necessary practical exercise. We had to understand that we didn’t need our physical belongings to call up our separate histories. More to the point, we had to learn that calling up our separate histories was okay. When you’re newly remarried, it can feel unhealthy and disloyal to your new partner to think too much about your time with your former partner. Going through boxes of possessions from those times was too much of that, in too stark and glaring a form. But we were faced with necessity, now: we had to allow for our separate histories by facing our separate histories. We had to wade through them and cull the physical objects with the understanding that we wouldn’t be culling our years before we knew one another. The separate memories we each held would float up like the barnacle-covered buoys they were. There was really no stopping them: that truth became increasingly clarified with every possession we let go. A painting was donated and the memory of its moment of purchase remained. A vase was given away and the fraught birthday when it was given came to mind in all its painful sensory detail. I had thought at first that downsizing would be just the cutting of stuff. And I was right: it was the cutting of stuff. But it wasn’t the cutting of anything else. Memories stay. Histories don’t unravel. We were a solidly remarried couple now, who could handle a purge. But would we have ever done so, without a radical move like this one? I’m not sure. Unremitting as they were, those boxes in the garage hadn’t seemed to be doing any real harm, after all. — Lots of things don’t seem like they’re doing any real harm; not really.

In the end we moved just enough. It took two days to put everything away, and then we were done. The side table from long ago made the cut, but my husband’s table did not. Our mattress was the same but I donated nearly ten different blankets that used to sit in the closet, waiting to be used. Some of those blankets were from before. Some were fairly recent purchases. I don’t miss them. I don’t miss anything we didn’t move here. I do wish, still, that some of the memories could have been left behind. I would have loved to sell them along with the house. But they’re all still here, in our smaller space, among our fewer things. Although we were exhausted at the end of moving day, in reality we didn’t move much that day at all. For the first time, we hired professional movers. They carried all the possessions, lugging them out of our old house and into the truck, and then out of the truck and into the elevator up to the twenty sixth floor. On moving day, they carried all of our possessions. We just possessed all we carried.