I was off to such a good start today…. I read a little, I submitted a batch of poems to a journal, I revised a poem or two (or at least reread them with an eye towards revision), I vacuumed and straightened up… and then I hit a wall (my boxes in the basement). There are plenty of other things on the to-do list (groceries, haircut, more cleaning, vacuum car) but I’ve lost my motivation and am about to take a long shower and put everything else off until tomorrow.
The house has a partially finished basement. One half of it, the finished half, serves as a family room. The other half is where the washer and dryer are, the hot water heater, the water softener, and a whole lot of room for storage. Most of my boxes of stuff are down there. The spare mattress and bed I bought when I was in Memphis is bagged and down there. Suitcases, fans, pillows, spare kitchen gadgets…. Basically, anything I don’t use but would if I had to furnish my own place is in a box in the basement or the garage.
This half of the basement is also where the mice get in when they choose to visit. We have little plug-in devices that are meant to deter them or drive them away. One time, when the breaker was tripped and the devices were off one or two mice got in. More recently, when my parents visited, they moved one of the devices that I had positioned near the entry point. More got in. Mice were never an issue when I had a cat.
I was focusing on cleaning the unfinished half because I know a mouse died somewhere down there (hopefully only one). Whenever I go looking for a dead mouse, I begin to think I wish my stuff weren’t all boxed up, I hope the mouse isn’t in my stuff, I should probably get rid of stuff, maybe I should put some shelves up to get the stuff off the floor, etc. etc. etc. stuff, stuff, stuff.
I don’t have a lot of stuff. With the exception of my car, all of my possessions can fit in one 16-foot moving truck. I’d like to pare that down to an even smaller truck. Nevertheless, I do have stuff. A few weeks ago, I went looking through my stuff for copies of the literary journal I founded and edited back in college. Stacked neatly along a wall in the basement are eight or nine boxes of books that haven’t been unpacked in three years. I knew the journals were in there somewhere… turns out they were in the eighth or ninth box I had opened. I put the stuff back in place in a half-assed fashion, and today I was going to fix that. As such, I looked through a few of the boxes: “desk stuff,” “kitchen stuff,” “books,” “Christmas stuff,” “pet stuff.” I have cat carriers for the cats I no longer have. I have Christmas stockings that no longer get hung. Seeing all of this, I felt overwhelmed. I felt heavy and sad. I felt unsettled. It was as if these boxes didn’t just hold my old stuff, but they represented the move to Memphis and the move here. They were strange reminders of my life before I moved. This was my wall.
Last night at the bar, a guy I hang out with, Gary, gave me a coin and asked if I’d be a memory tester for him. He’s worried that he has a split personality or that he’s losing his memory. As a tester, I’m supposed to (on some random date in the future) pull out the coin and ask him if he knows anything about it. Gary is also having another friend from the bar help him purge his stuff. The purging isn’t going well because every time the other guy sets something aside for the trash, Gary takes it back. As I looked at my stuff today, befuddled on where to start and what I should purge, I thought about Gary. I understand the holding on – these physical objects might one day be the only thing I have to jog my memory of the life I’ve lived and the people and things that have been important.
Boxing everything up three years ago was a difficult and bittersweet process – so was loading the van, emptying the house, and putting Nick in his carrier and driving away. Because I had planned on buying a house in Memphis, a lot of my stuff never got unpacked. Consequently, I never really dealt with some of the emotions involved in leaving. In some respects, it’s as if I hit pause and I have this emotional time-bomb waiting for me in the basement. Going through even a few boxes and trying to decide what I might want to keep reminds me that I have no way to anticipate my future – that the pause button was never fully released. It also feels like I’m still in the process of leaving home, of starting over, or clawing my way back to something familiar. I remember the empty house and that sigh-laden sensation of one last look around. But I also remember the life I thought I was building before the move. The excitement for the unknown future – when the house was full of boxes with someone else’s stuff as they moved in. And I haven’t been able to find my way back to that sense of wonder, warmth, and giddiness. I suppose this might be the difference between moving away from something and moving towards something – arrivals and departures, anticipation and memory, boxes in the basement waiting for a home.