A Moving Experience

Two trucks came and took all our stuff away. That's how much stuff there was after living in our house for 16 years: one giant moving truck was not enough! We needed a bonus baby truck!

I know I have always bragged about how much I love throwing everything out; I am the opposite of a hoarder and I inflict that philosophy on the rest of my family. Even so, we had way, way, way too much stuff in our lives. At least, that's how I see it now.

What has made the experience even weirder, even more disorienting, though, is that we didn't have a new place to move into yet. The big giant truck and the smaller auxiliary truck were taking our accumulation to a warehouse out of our sight for an unknown amount of time. In the meantime, for almost two weeks now, we have been living in an extended-stay hotel with our very confused 13-year-old cockapoo. It's not really a hotel. It's more of a motel. A motel that accepts dogs.

I have developed a newly-found empathy for itinerant workers. It's strange not having your home, even if you're a busy person who's not there very much. You may not realize it, but your home is in your head all the time, even when you're not thinking about it. You know where your stuff is. Your stuff helps identify you, helps set parameters for your life. All the clothes you're not wearing right this minute are still speaking to you from your closet. All the pots and placemats, the toothbrush holders and tennis rackets, the endless supply of decorative candles in glass votives (I never want to pack another glass item ever again!) are all part of you in a subliminal way.

Back at the motel, we're stepping over suitcases and containers of dog food. Everything is unfamiliar and waiting to trip me or make me bang my knee into a corner of furniture. But we do finally know where we're going and hope to be moving there in one more week. (Oh, the vagaries of real estate paperwork!)

I'm not sure where the other people staying at the motel are headed: the group of children who are often playing in the parking lot; the guy who was under his big old car trying to fix it one day by banging on it really loudly; the woman walking the schnauzer; the guy who's up on the catwalk every night talking in Spanish on his cellphone for two hours.

For me and my family it's just a short while until we will get reunited with our stuff and turn this experience into our moving story. Once we get settled, there will still be more things that I'm going to need to throw out, but the memory of this won't be one of them.