TuesdayMusings

Moving is hard.

Moving is hard. I’m not usually one for excuses, but I am going to use one now. It’s been three months since I made the move to Oklahoma City. Starting a new job, setting up temporary living quarters and juggling the buying and selling of homes a thousand miles apart has taken its toll. I’ve missed a few weeks of writing. The mental capacity I thought I had was taken up completely by navigating a new place and working to shut down the old one.

This picture tells it all. Pieces of my life are on the sidewalk in front of the house I loved for seven years. Piles of mementos, well-worn furniture, tattered clothes and random broken or misfit home decor lie there for the rest of the world to view. I am offloading these scraps that I have carried with me over the last few decades. Sometimes it feels good to purge. Sometimes it’s painful.

Just in this photo alone, I notice the White Mountain ice cream maker. This beauty of a bucket with all its working stainless steel parts made me some award-winning ice cream one summer and brought hours of hand cranking joy to the members of my family that gathered around it every Fourth of July. Ok, joy might be an exaggeration for those who didn’t exactly love their twenty minutes of hard labor. But…my rule was if you don’t take a turn on the churn, you don’t get to sample the results!

The vintage candlestick Christmas lights with the old orange C7 ceramic bulbs are sitting there. These were not a family heirloom, but, rather, a treasure I picked up at an estate sale a few years ago. This house had the perfect windows for these homemade row candelabras. Our new house won’t have a place for them.

In the box next door to the seasonal items, is my old bowling ball. You have to zoom in to see the maroon polisher bag it’s swaddled in. That ball is engraved with my nickname Babs. I’ve had that ball since I was 16. I haven’t bowled in a league in twenty years. But the last time I did, it was with my now 28-year-old son, then 6 years old, as a mother-son doubles team in Avondale, AZ. Somewhere in those boxes are the scoresheets I saved celebrating his first strike and his first spare!

Beat up camp chairs, dusty chandeliers and outdated office supplies (who uses stackable plastic in-box trays anymore?) sit there patiently waiting for someone to come by and take them before the city’s brush and bulky collectors come to haul everything off.

It’s a collection, alright. My collection. The old photos that went to the trash are now in my head. There’s just too many of them. It made no sense to keep lugging around hundreds of individual Kodak prints only to have them stay buried deep in a closet somewhere until someone else would have to make the decision to keep or toss them.

Did you spot Ariel staring out from under the red Coleman cooler? That giant shopping bag was left over from a Disney Cruise the year my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. The entire family sailed to Alaska in 2012 and apparently brought home loads of treasures untold, whozits and whatzits galore! Funny how the sack survived all this time only to find its final use as a trash bag on moving day.

I think I’ll choose to cherish the memories and focus on exploring a new world, just like the Little Mermaid who relished in her gadgets and gizmos but ultimately realized she wanted more. So, off I go, to write a new chapter, to see what unfolds. Moving is hard, but it will be worth it.