Moving is not easy. Whether you're moving into a college dorm, moving from house to house, or helping a friend or family member move, the things of our lives get dragged along with us to make a house feel like a home.
Step one, pack the boxes.
Photo albums, soccer trophies, and painted plaster animals were piled into boxes. Notebooks, pens, and novels, shoved into backpacks for the trip. Years of living is stripped off the walls and packed away until all that remains is the dust under the bed that hasn't been swept in years. Nails stick out of the walls commemorating the decorations that used to show off photographs or artistic taste. The rooms that were once filled with life and family become full of boxes. This is practice for change.
Step two, load the truck.
The next thing is to move the boxes out of the house. Furniture gets carefully lifted through doorways and loaded onto a truck. The truck becomes a jigsaw puzzle of couches and tables and memories. Possessions travel, but what gets left behind?
Step three, drive.
Whether the new place is far away or relatively close, it's likely to be a new neighborhood. New houses, stores, and streets make up a maze that will soon become home. The new house looks clean and different.
Step four, into the new room.
The truck door slams open and the people surround the truck with empty hands. This calls for lifting with your legs, not your back and being careful with the television. What was an empty house slowly gets filled with the memories from the old house. Friends and family come to help share in new beginnings.
Step five, unpack the boxes.
Out come the books, movies, plates, paintings, board games, dog toys, shoes, coats, magnets, brushes, pillows, CD's, and all the pieces collected over the years to commemorate a vacation or a friendship. The once-empty floors of the new place start to look like home when familiar objects line the walls.
Step six, relax.
The old house may have been the location of years of memories, but the new one holds just as much potential. It isn't really a new start--just a new location. All the things collected over a life travel to the new place to make it feel like home. It's not so much the building as the people inside of it.
In my case, this move came after my sophomore year of college. This means I could be moving into my own apartment when I graduate from college, or maybe live with my parents for a little longer while searching for a job. That kind of move will be drastically different. This one was bittersweet. I left the house I have lived in for nearly fourteen years, where I grew up and spent time with my family, to a new house that I most likely won't spend that many years in. It's beautiful, new and exciting, but also different.
In this move I realized that the places you live and the things you fill them with do have meaning. This is not to say that possessions hold a whole lot of value; but they are pieces of our lives that bring back memories. Even if I break my favorite watch or lose a letter in the event of a move, I'll have that memory of why I liked that watch and why I kept that letter. The pieces of our lives may not stay with us but they will always be with us. Thank you Cabot Street.