Monday, January 14, 2008

Moving

I’ve moved four times in the past 18 months. I’m not talking about moving in the sense of loading up my van and switching crags, like the good old days. When everything I owned had its own crate and tucked neatly under the DIY bed in the back of the van, and it was as simple as securing anything that could kill you in a sudden stop, paying for old laundry or camping tabs, picking up bottle tops and garlic skins around the camp, filling up water jugs and the gas tank, and hitting the road for the next crag in season. No, the move I’m referring to is not like that at all.

Over the past few years, I’ve acquired more and more belongings. It started out small—my stuff in a friend’s basement and sleeping in the spare bedroom on a borrowed futon to a yurt in Colorado. Then it was a townhouse in Carbondale to a rental house in Salt Lake City, and now, the BIG ONE: a three-bedroom house with a mortgage.

You might think it’s moving the big stuff around that irks me. Like the new, and first in my life, big grown-up bed. It is one of those fancy Tempurpedic things that weighs a ton and cost more than my van did. Or maybe it’s the antique oak desk that I’ve had since college that has been actually Fed-Ex’ed to me twice. No, it’s the peculiar things such as: the same can of vegetarian refried beans that doesn’t expire until Jan. 2010, a Costco brand bottle of Glucosamine Sulfate, a dozen random, chipped coffee mugs I never use, a value-sized tube of No Ad sunscreen, or the $250 pair of size 26 leather jeans I will never fit into again and only wore once. These are things I can live without, but can’t seem to get rid of each time I move.

The “Things I rarely use and I am sick of moving, which I would like to get rid of but cannot because I will someday inevitably need them” are: boxes of tax returns, chains for my truck, aid climbing gear, iPod warranty and original packaging, 6/4 wetsuit, and a bridesmaid dress and black pumps.

Then there are the things that although I seldom touch, look at or think about, I cannot live without. A note, scrawled in a five-year-olds handwriting on faded-brown lined paper my little sister wrote me for my 16th birthday, my heart rock collection, the flute I played in grade school, a red lacquered fake diamond turtle pin my grandmother bought me from K-mart when I was four, my first (and only) climbing journal, a poem a boy wrote me in Jr. High, my college student I.D., and a tacky southwestern-patterned fleece jacket my mother (who no doubt got it from the Sundance outlet) gave me for Christmas the year I moved out west from Iowa.

Considering all the moving around I’ve done for the greater part of my adult life, it’s a wonder I have been able to keep track of much more than my passport and proof of car insurance.

1 comment:

Bill Becher said...

Congrats on the new house. Send me the jeans, I'm on a diet.

Bill