In Which The Scholar Gypsy Finds A Home

I am moving again.

This time it is into our own home and so this, hopefully, will be the last move for a long time. I have gotten pretty good at it over the years - I count 17 in total. If you do the math that’s one move for every 19 months, although in reality I stayed in some places a lot longer than others. That being said, I’ve gotten pretty good at packing my life up and moving on. In fact I always kept the same boxes and knew exactly which items got packed in which box, and which box fit where in my car. I can tell you that if you put books in a duffle bag and clothes in a box you can carry more of each and more easily.

But two years ago, when my husband and I moved into our current place, I made the decision that I was going to ‘settle down’ - I was going to plant some roots. So I unpacked every bin. I threw out each one of those boxes that had travelled with me all those years and I intentionally didn’t keep good-looking moving boxes that I came across. I started buying furniture and picture frames and dishes. And now we are moving into a home of our very own and I’m looking around wondering where on earth all this stuff came from and how am I ever going to move it all! My only consolation is that this will be my last move for a long time.

I do want to say that moving is great opportunity to purge any useless, wasted, or unwanted items from your life; it’s a streamlining, a lightening of the load; it puts things in perspective. Who knows what we’ve managed to collect over the last two years and are these objects, these things, something that we really need? I know exactly what possessions are most important to me - they’re the ones I found room for in the cramped backseat of my car, the ones I deemed worthy of packing up and carrying with me each time I moved on.

It will be nice to build a nest, to create a home for myself and my family, to encourage that wandering spirit of mine to find a place to be at peace. I’m looking forward to the future, but in doing so, am reminded of my past.

In no particular order, here are a few of the places I have lived in (by lived, I mean have actually taken up residence and not counting the homes I lived in with my parents):

-         four apartments, for some reason each one a completely different lay-out than the others (I thought that would be pretty standard?) but each fairly decent

-         the upstairs of two houses and the downstairs of one

-         a hotel

-         a van

-         a house with 8 people and one bathroom. (I slept in the dining room. And often peed in the yard.)

-         An R.V. And not one of the big nice ones, one of those pop-up ones. A friend of mine slept on the floor and we hung our clothes to dry on the picnic table outside.

-     the basement of a house which I shared with two other people

-         a tar-paper shack. Yes literally, with a pump in the basement to bring in water which always seemed to break after I had lathered my hair.