Moving and Stuff

I’ve mentioned here a couple of times over recent weeks how Vera and I have gotten ourselves a farm on which to live and keep Vera’s horses. The move has been a long time coming, the culmination of years of talking and planning and looking and finally finding. Even once we found the right place it still took a few months to get everything in place.

And it’s great. Well worth it, we already know.

We’re already mostly moved in, although we’ve still got a few items left to go. The last few days especially have been filled with lots of to-and-fro-ing as we gradually trucked everything to the new place. For others Boxing Day was the 26th, but for us boxing day was really the 27th as we spent something like 12 hours straight that day filling an endless-seeming supply of cardboard cubes and taping them shut.

I’ll probably be writing more here about country life before too long. While neither of us ever were especially “city,” this move does represent a change of sorts as we’re now pretty well isolated. From our old place it was a five-minute walk to grocery stores and restaurants, but here it’ll be a decent-length drive to get anywhere.

Today, though, I’m more preoccupied with the whole process of moving and getting settled. Vera and I have done this together perhaps eight or nine times overall, although the last time we did was several years ago.

Moving always forces a person to reconsider his or her relationship to possessions, large and small. I always think of the George Carlin bit about “stuff” in which he expounds hilariously -- and insightfully -- on the wise observation that “a house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”

There’s also that whole “this is your life” game that goes along with packing and unpacking all that stuff. I’ve had a few of those moments over the last couple of days where I’ve lingered over this or that item as it reminded me of a past experience.

The long path through graduate school and a teaching career has been heavily documented -- to absurd lengths, really, and I’m thinking already of a first use of that fire pit that was left for us here on the farm by the previous owners. So, too, are there a myriad of reminders of various highlights from this second career, the one in poker that more or less began right here on this blog.

So there’s the invitation to scrutinize one’s own materialism (or lack thereof). And there’s the memory lane stuff. But moving to a new place also engenders thoughts of the future, too, and the new projects and paths that lie ahead. The fact that our move is coinciding with the end of the calendar year is probably further heightening that tempation to make resolutions.

You know, about all the new stuff I’d like to do.