18/2025: Moving and changing

Image © Jose 2025

We have moved.

Thursday and Friday were reserved to pack and move into our new home, which is still a house, an unfinished house, now filled with boxes and boxes, many more boxes than we thought we’d have, isn’t always the same. We were living in a small apartment, with a big basement, and I am very good at Tetris!

You probably read in one of my previous posts that this is not my first move… I have a running joke that by the time I check in to a home I will have a small bag with my toothbrush, toothpaste, and a deodorant (yes, I know…). Every time I move, I leave behind 30% of stuff that ceases to make sense to carry around, and I pay attention to what I still carry around, it reminds me of people and stages in my life. These things are the ones that survive the “if you don’t touch them in a year, you will never touch them again” mantra, I may go months, years without touching them, but I can’t leave them behind, they are an inner make-up of who I am. There is the leather jacket that belonged to my dad, too big for me, still.  There is a box with some random stuff, like some textbooks from my time in Rhodesia then/ Zimbabwe now, photos of when I came to the US when I was 18. There is the box with drawings from my children from when they were kids. There is a box with money from 32 different places, some of that money doesn’t exist anymore. And so on, and so on, junk for some, I am sure.

We are creatures of habit, and the most interesting thing when we move is how do we adapt to forced change, you just can’t use the towel in the same place you did, you can’t sit facing that window, you can’t move the same way, sleep the same way, eat the same way. And this is despite you having all your habitual gadgets and routines that you are used to. But place, context, space, rhythm, distance, light, everything makes up the experience, and a new experience it is. This is what takes time, this is the process of turning a place, a house, your home. And it is full of discovery, while you might spend some time remembering how you loved to sit in that corner of the house and face the morning sun, you find yourself looking and feeling the space for a similar but different corner, a place that might feel different at first, but then it slides in, sometimes showing there are even better corners to sit and enjoy the sun.

I cannot say I am an outdoors person, just because I am comparing myself to some people, I really think are outdoors people, meaning, they spend the better part of their lives outdoor, they live for it, crave it, need it. I was born in Africa, and till 16 I spent the better part of my life outdoors, playing and learning what not to do, my mother kept a list of all the occasions I ended up getting stitches from learning the hard way, I think I have more than 30 all over the head and body. Then life started to happen indoors, and while I still love the outdoors, I spend most of my time inside. But this house has outdoors, has a nice front and backyard, a small stretch of woods behind the garage, and we can walk to a small cove like beach. And suddenly I am taking the outdoors in again, slowly because the weather is still unpredictable, but be it eating outside on the deck or just walking around getting your feet wet, starting to work in the driveway, simple tasks that feel so good. The outdoor people by now are going, yhhehha, or duuhhh!

We are not done with the house, we have several small and larger projects to be done in the near future, I’m on my phase of doing all the stuff I want and should be doing, also to save money and let the contractor finish his end of the job. We moved, and it feels great, the beginning of a new journey.