We moved last weekend to a new apartment about 1/2 mile from where we used to live. We're still renting, saving up our pennies to buy a place when Owen is closer to kindergarten age and we have to pay attention to things like living in a good school district and having more than one bathroom for soon-to-be-teenagers-before-we-know-it.
Moving is an opportunity to do something I love: purge. It's like losing weight without having to give up wine or carbs. My affinity for getting rid of clothes I never wear, stacks of papers Dave rarely reads, toys the kids have outgrown, and furniture that is worse for wear borders on obsession. I'm on a mission to declutter everything in my line of sight, tackling the bathroom cabinets, our closet, the kids' dressers, the toy bins, the kitchen drawers, the storage unit and our office files in the armoire. Everything we don't need or don't use goes, with a few exceptions.
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| Our new home |
Those exceptions are what got me thinking recently about how much has changed in my life, noticing what I was willing to give up this time around that I hadn't in past moves. It also made me realize what I wanted to hold on to, what still felt relevant and important. Because despite my love of throwing things away, I am a sentimental person who has accumulated mementos from various stages of my life, starting with childhood photos of my parents, to a birthday card I received a few weeks ago from my college friend, Sarah, that said, "If I were Mormon, I'd want you as my sister wife."
Here are some of the things that made it to Buckingham Place, and other items that didn't.
WHAT WENT
Incomprehensible Asian art. During my trip to China in 2006, I stumbled upon a gift shop in some gardens in Suzhou, a city west of Shanghai known for its canals. In the gift shop I purchased many drawings I later had framed, including one of a wizened Chinese man sitting on a rock staring intently at a turtle. Above the turtle there were a few lines of Chinese characters, but I had no idea what they said. There was something about this scene that spoke to me, and I still don't know what it was. But I hung that picture in the bedroom of the condo I bought as a single girl in Chicago, on the wall directly across from my bed. I would often stare at it while nestled under the covers and think about what it meant. When Dave and I moved to our apartment on Clifton nearly two years ago, I hung it in Owen's room. When we moved last weekend, I put it in the alley next to the trash cans for the scavengers that come through daily with their shopping carts. Nine years later, my trip to China with a girlfriend from grad school felt like another lifetime. It was an important trip, yes, but the picture didn't provoke the same sense of wonder. And I had another calligraphy drawing of two intertwined fish from that trip to remind me of that adventure. For the old man and the turtle, it was time to go.
The Twin Towers. Another casualty of the move was a small charcoal drawing of the Twin Towers a friend had given me after grad school, likely purchased from one of the many street vendors in New York. This was back in 1999, two years before the towers had come crashing down, and for days I could see plumes of smoke where they used to be from across the Hudson River in the New Jersey courthouse where I worked. I remember the eerie quiet of the streets in Manhattan for weeks after the attack, when I would venture into the city to go to swing dance class. The feeling that everything we had in life was an illusion that could disappear in a second. The visceral sense that there was no solid ground beneath my feet. Seeing the popular defense attorney around the courthouse whose son, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, was still missing. Hearing the whispers that the son's wife was pregnant with their first child. I hung that charcoal drawing in every apartment I moved to after grad school, from New Jersey to Miami to Chicago. This time it didn't make the cut. I didn't want to hold onto that sad time anymore. I had another poster of the Chrysler Building, my favorite high-rise in Manhattan, to remind me of how important New York City was to me. How moving there for grad school taught me what a real city looked like, smelled like, sounded like and felt like. The city that had changed the trajectory of my life.
Cigar box. After college I rented a room in San Diego from an older woman who liked doing art projects. She would collect old cigar boxes and glue pictures onto the top of them, covering them with coat after coat of lacquer and lining the inside with felt. For my 23rd birthday, she surprised me with a cigar box with a black-and-white photo of my grandma painting my mom's fingernails when she was 4 years old. It was a tender moment, with my mom staring intently at her nails while my grandma focused on staying inside the lines, her hair held in pin curls by bobby pins. I held onto that cigar box for years, filling it with my passport, social security card, sorority pin and other valuables like the 1984 Olympic silver dollars my grandpa had given me the year the Games had been held in Los Angeles. I liked that picture because of its innocence, a mother and daughter engaged in a moment of intimacy before the hurt feelings and resentment set in. I've noticed that about myself over they years, that I'm drawn to photos that show connection between members of my family that no longer get along, such as my parents. I have a small book of their wedding photos that have come with me on every move. My mom so blushing and beautiful. My dad so confident and handsome. Them both so happy, so young. But the cigar box was starting to fall apart. It no longer closed and the wood had splintered around the edges. With my grandma dying earlier this year and my coming to terms with who she was to both me and my mom, I no longer needed the picture. Sometimes you only need to carry something in your heart.
WHAT STAYED
Tess' gown. A few months after I found out that our second child was going to be a girl, my mom gave me a tiny yellow gown with draw string on the bottom. It had a sweetheart collar and a little white bunny embroidered on the front. "It's the gown I brought you home from the hospital in," Mom said. I was touched and surprised that she had kept it. Like me, she isn't a big fan of clutter and has moved half a dozen times since we all lived together in my childhood home. The gown was
unisex, as back when I was born parents didn't have the luxury of
knowing whether they were having a boy or girl. But it seemed more
suited for a girl, particularly because I knew that I had worn it. I
packed it in my hospital bag in the weeks before my due date and Dave and I struggled to get Tess' 7
pound, 6 ounce frame into it when the photographer at the hospital came
for a photo shoot shortly after she was born. She also wore it home from
the hospital, even though her newborn chicken legs kept getting tangled
in the draw string. Once home, I tucked it into the bottom drawer of
her dresser. A year later, when I was packing up her dresser for our
move, I put the tiny yellow gown into the box with the rest of her
clothes, thinking that one day, 20-plus years from now, I may pass it along
to her to carry on the tradition.
Laurie plaque. Growing up in a suburban two-story track home on Port Margate, with a park down the street and a pool around the corner, I had a little plaque on the door of my bedroom that said, "Laurie." I don't remember where it came from. But there's something about that blue ceramic nameplate, with my name scripted in bold navy letters, that takes me back to my childhood bedroom. I feel the green shag carpet under my feet and see the matching striped green-and-pink patterned wallpaper. I remember the desk in front of the French window that faced the neighbor's house, where one of the teenage boys engaged in ear-splitting drum sessions in their garage while I did my homework. I remember the sliding doors of my closet that held my plaid private school jumpers and my bookshelf filled with swim team trophies -- gold plated swimmers crouched on starting blocks waiting for the gun to go off. I remember the ammonia smell of the Green Out shampoo with the mermaid on the bottle that my mom would use to scrub the green tint out of my sun-bleached blonde hair, the result of the chlorine that saturated the pools I spent entire summers in. I remember Eric's light- and dark-blue checkered wallpapered bedroom across the hall and how he became afraid of his closet after we saw "Poltergeist," and slept with Mom for weeks. I remember slamming my bedroom door so hard during fights with my mom that it came off the hinges. But most of all I remember innocence.
Cards from Dave. Dave is a good writer. He never wanted me to proofread his papers in law school and doesn't ask me to read the briefs he now drafts for his clients and that's probably a good thing. Best to keep my red lining out of his business. I don't know how well his legal writing flows (or doesn't), but when he puts pen to paper in the cards he writes me for every birthday and holiday, he fills the entire inside and sometimes even the back of the card with his heart. He uses these occasions to reflect on what he's been thinking about and how he feels about us. He confessed long ago that he used to think Valentine's Day was commercial bullshit until he met me. Suddenly his resentment of the marketing industry evaporated, but not entirely, as you can tell from one of the V-Day cards I received a few years ago. A friend of mine who has been married 15 years and has four kids once told me, "First it's about you. Then it's about us. Then it's about them." I can see those shifts in the cards Dave has written me over the years, which continue to serve as a history of the passages of our relationship. These days our life definitely feels like it's about "them" and we often daydream about when it will be about "us" again. The cards Dave buys me are typically blank inside so he can write his own message. They are sometimes from Papyrus or another artsy card maker etched with pretty, whimsical designs. Whenever I receive a new one I say the same thing, "Aw, babe. Thanks." And I give him a hug with tears in my eyes. I keep them stacked in one of the mesh storage containers in our armoire. One day, when I have some downtime, I may read them all in one sitting and reflect on all we've accomplished and overcome together. Probably when I'm old and gray, sitting on a beach in San Diego, where we vow to move the second the kids go away to college.
