On moving things

Ever since the age of eighteen, packing and moving, settling in and unpacking has been a regular ritual of my life. In 1981, my first significant pack-and-move involved an accumulation of new stuff: a dormitory refrigerator, a desk shelf, and most importantly several long sleeve, 100 percent wool sweaters in varying hues to worn over the cotton turtleneck and cowl-neck jerseys that were all in the vogue. There also were new shoes, new socks, sweats, posters, and the requisite hot pot that every college freshman seemed to possess for instant coffee, tea, and cup-a-soups.

And, of course, there was the stereo: speakers, cassette tape deck, receiver, and turntable. And, later on, the dorm room TV. And, still later, the answering machine. It was the 1980s, the era of greed, but I also was eighteen to twenty-two years old and finding myself in the form of the things I owned.

From college, I embarked on a series of newspaper internship ventures, where I would move from one furnished apartment to another in different parts of the country every four months. I kept up this ritual for sixteen months, accumulating a Honda Civic Hatchback in the process (graduation gift from my parents), more clothes, books, and a steadily growing box of clips -- stories published in the newspaper bearing my byline. Oh, and yes, my first cat -- the first cat that was not the much loved cat Fritzie from childhood but a stray picked up by my co-intern and still-friend Laura.

The internship ventures landed me my first job and first unfurnished apartment. For the first time in my life, I began buying furniture. An antique wardrobe from a shop in Peculiar, Mo., where the husband and wife who owned the shop expressed excitement over the fact that I had "begun to set up housekeeping". An older antique-like bookshelf, and the prized possession of most bohemian twenty-somethings back then: a futon sofa that could fold out into a bed. I also picked up a gray sofa and chair, and two more cats.

From that job, I went to another, and for the first time, experienced the thrill of the moving truck. The movers arrived, spent what seemed like an entire afternoon loading my belongings into their truck and then told me they couldn't promise me when the goods would arrive in Seattle since I possessed such a small load. I felt indignant. I had so much stuff. How could it be regarded as a small load?

From an apartment in Seattle -- located on the third floor of a brick building built in the 1920s with no buzzer or elevator -- I moved into my first house. Feeling sure that my boyfriend and I had accumulated virtually nothing of merit, we dispensed with the formalities of movers and with the help of our young generous crowd of early thirties friends proceeded to move ourselves. The move lasted about three days and involved at least fifty trips back and forth. How could we have accumulated so many things? We lived in a place with virtually no space.

A couple of years later, I moved -- very lightly -- to Honolulu, intending to stay there only a year. (I stayed for 11.) I brought some clothes (nothing wintry), my prized set of Henkels kitchen knives, a laptop computer, some books and virtually nothing else. I left behind three-quarters of my possessions in boxes in the home's basement and supplemented my household in Honolulu with new goods purchased at rummage sales or gifted to me by friends exiting the islands.

I left Honolulu in 2006. By then, I was forty-three and married. We came back with four bicycles, several boxes of books, three cats, household appliances, jewelry, a piano, and virtually no furniture. We came back to a house that had been occupied by a renter for nine years. It was still packed to the brim with her stuff and its appearance put me in shock. "Welcome back to your house, Himanee" a sign hung gaily from masking tape in the front room proclaimed.

As I got over my shock, I took stock of what had occurred. The short end of the story was that the stuff that I had left behind had stayed behind and aged. I discovered the wardrobe from Peculiar, Mo., with sagging doors, the antique bookshelf from the shop in Westport in Kansas City, and Ikea shelves and pillows from a long-vanished sofa set all over the place. It took a year for us to summon the courage to do it, but finally the boyfriend with whom I had bought the house and I -- with the support of my husband -- ventured into the basement to unearth what had been left behind. Much of it went to Goodwill; some of it went to the dump. A few prized items were recovered, including a stuffed toy lamb that had been given to me at birth. The entire basement was emptied ultimately in 2010 in the last few days that I lived in the house before moving east to New York. We moved much as I had moved to Seattle twenty-two years earlier, with a moving truck. The movers took a mere forty-five minutes to load our belongings onto their truck and nearly six weeks to deliver. Our load was that small.

My husband and I made one more move a year later, from an apartment in Saratoga Springs to our country farmhouse eight miles away. The most difficult possession to move was a king-sized mattress and box spring my husband had finally coaxed me into buying. It had to be rolled like a sausage in order to fit up the narrow staircase to the second floor and twisted like a pretzel to get around the 90-degree bend at the midpoint. We agreed not to hold the movers responsible for damage to the mattress, and to our relief, none seemed to occur. But as we looked at the mattress and narrow staircase it had ascended and the tiny 1840s style windows and low overhanging eaves, we realized that even if we made another move, the mattress was probably going to stay in its current locale for the rest of its life.

I am now helping my parents make what they think will be their final move -- from a big empty-nester home that was built to accommodate their seventy-something desires a decade and a half ago but is now too large and too difficult for them to manage singlehandedly. I am working with my mom to sort through her decades of accumulated stuff. She is decisive and indecisive simultaneously. Every item in question seems to have a story, and that story is linked genealogically to the history of her life, my father's life, as well as my own. My parents are not pack-rats. They are practical and level-headed. So the move will probably be relatively easy for them. But still there are things, things that have acquired life and personality, even as they are inanimate: the wool blanket purchased in the 1950s in Kashmir by my father in his young adult days when he gazed at the breathtaking beauty and captured it in Urdu verse; the tablecloths and napkins embroidered by my mother, the linoleum block print tablecloth she created in Iowa City when I was a baby that was inspired, she told me for the first time today, by the many faces of mood that I, at age one, showed. And more. The stories that reside in these things seem larger than life. They cannot be shed. They keep our past alive in our present. But can they remain live if they become stockpiles, accumulated junk that we forget we ever owned but cannot bear to dis-possess?