Dear Reader,
We’re on the crest of a big move, my husband and I. In our decade-plus together, this will be our third joint move, all within a few short miles of one another but big transitions nonetheless as moving is never really a small thing. As we spend this final month wrapping up what we can on our quick build and pack out of the first full home we built together, I am reflecting on the spaces that’ve housed me with a grateful heart.
Moving is exciting to me. It’s an opportunity to revisit and audit a personal collection of beloved objects, take stock of what still serves and release the rest. The sometimes tender act of packing, to handle and consider each and every thing once more — either to be dusted and wrapped with care and revealed again within new walls, or to have been bid ‘thank you and farewell’ to and placed in the box to be taken away for someone else to find as a treasure — I call this taking personal inventory. Moving offers a fresh page in a life’s story to re-envision one’s most precious space, the one that houses love, change, growth, hardship, and healing. It’s thrilling and hopeful and full of potential, the prospect of who you will be in this new place — a more adventurous cook, a committed gardener, an avid reader, a better follower of rhythm and routine. Life holds the potential to feel new when all of your belongings are packed in boxes and you are uprooted.
In the same hand in which I embrace change I also believe in and cherish the investment of time it takes to foster a relationship with a place. The feeling of home can strike almost instantly and without logical explanation; I felt it when I first came to this part of the island and I felt it when I visited Lucca, one of the Italian regions of my ancestors. But it’s like love at first sight, an instantaneous connection but one still shrouded in so much unknown. Intimacy is where true love blooms, and it’s only cultivated through time and a devotion of presence.
In each of the places I have lived I have found home, whether in the long-time cultivation of relationship with the place or through the discovery of my power to create home wherever I go. All of these homes have felt like love affairs — some deep, entangled, and complicated, some lasting a mere season, sweet like honey on the tongue but unable to endure. For each I could write a poem, some verses long and others a haiku.
From the room in the house I grew up in, where the walls changed color every handful of years, each moon-phase of life, a time stamp of the evolution of my youth; with the bedding bearing a small indigo colored paint stain because art was almost always made on my bed; with the closet doors half covered in a temporary mounted raw canvas on which I created the piece that ended a long art-making hiatus and eventually called me to my island home.
Then the long retired horse stall, my first home in Hawai’i that I shared for seven months with my best childhood friend. I can still feel the weight of pulling open the sliding barn door in the mornings, like drawing the curtains to let the light in; waking with the chickens; the art and found objects and over-worked paint brushes in recycled jars intentionally arranged on turquoise painted shelves; the rug in the middle of the room, littered with paper clippings after a night spent Valentine crafting for new friends.
Shortly after, a childhood dream come true in the form of a rusted Bluebird school bus whom I affectionately named my Destino. My stationary home on wheels was as old as I was and over the course of a year and a half living cozily within its arched walls, it was also my canvas. Whimsical portraits and lyrics to songs; a favorite storybook from childhood plastered on the ceiling above the bed; hand-built shelves of cork topped jars, seashells, photographs curled up in the humidity.
Then the merging of two lives, when I moved into a purple house where my love lived. I claimed the extra bedroom as a place to unpack my treasures and stage my art; a sovereign space that felt creatively mine in a home where someone else had already been existing for years. Though only shared for a couple of months, this time feels marked by the incense we burned, the dinners co-created, rooftop stargazing, projector movie nights, the places where the floor creaked underfoot, and the colorful bedroom that was mine but never slept in.
That Spring brought a major down-size and an attempt to fit two people into the nine by sixteen foot shack perched on a hill, that rocked in the high winds, and had a million dollar view of the sea. The kitchen would get wet when it rained and the bed was the only seating but we transformed a bachelor’s cabin into a colorful celebration of modest living. Honey processing and early farmer’s market mornings; sunset walks on a car-free road with our goat and pig trotting freely behind; hanging laundry on the line between rain squalls; fastening down the roofing during a Valentine’s Day hurricane; from bed, sounds of horse hooves thundering under full moon nights. I coordinated four art shows within a year’s time from this space.
Then a sudden move, again in Spring, into the half-built house we’d been custom crafting on land that was not ours. For the first three months it was stud walls and plywood floors, a mosquito net over the bed, a utility lamp as our only lighting, and a claw foot tub as the only running water source. We were challenged but grateful (and delusional), brimming with love for one another and visions of this as our forever home. Mud Seasons; Flower Seasons; hosting holidays; pandemic gardens; growing our animal family; outgrowing this place.
As I sit on a floor cushion typing these words out in this half packed home, a candle lit on the coffee table, the afternoon sky dark gray with rain, all is quiet but the dripping from the back gutter. I scan the room and note the unfinished details — non existent trim, parts of walls unpainted — and the things still needing to be packed. As we’ve been constructing the next space to be moved into in just a few weeks time, in our excitement and the looming deadline we’ve hardly paused to reflect on our eight years here. Now as I sit alone and break from my writing to take it in, I feel a tenderness. A lot of life has been lived between these walls: relationship milestones, dinners shared, businesses begun, toasting successes, heartbreak from loss, friendships deepened and faded out, philosophical discussions, big things processed, dreams actualized.
At the end of the month, we will close this significant chapter to begin anew and we couldn’t feel more ready. While we walk away confidently from our complicated love for this house, and all of the others that came before, we pack with us everything it taught us about what makes a home.
Getting ready for a move is so chaotic and angsty for me! Reading your reflection gave me hope and inspiration that maybe the next time there’s a big shift in my life I can take the time to really hold things. Both the emotional and physical baggage I’m clearing out of packing away and saving for another time. Inevitably when I move there’s just one or two boxes filled with loose change, one lost sock found under the heavy dresser, broken crayons and, 500 Bobby pins. The detritus of our life. It’s inevitable no matter how thoughtful the packing has been, we always end up with this loose box of bits, valuable enough to be used again, but lost from their original purpose, hoping to be reunited and returned to use for fear of being lost to the landfill. There’s an impulse when I’m packing to toss things out and just allow the dump to deal with the 1/2 roll of wrapping paper that’s been sitting under my bed for three years. Hopefully the next time we have to move house, I can re read this post and remember to slow down, take my time and appreciate what a gift this life, these things and this place all are.