It’s Time to Move On
And so it hits me, with the snowflakes falling over the South Toe Valley, ripping off the Black Mountains through the pitch of night and settling like a veil of lace onto early Spring daffodils. It hits me, with the first box full of books and the gap left on the shelf like a missing tooth in a girlish smile. It hits me, that I am moving.
In twenty minutes I pack nine boxes of books and am halfway done (not counting the seven boxes of books I’ve stored permanently at my parent’s home) with the shelves. Four more boxes of odds and ends, household décor and superfluous little items I won’t need for months. Four other boxes are already packed, two for photography and two for yarns and crafty things. I leave the desk, the clothes, the kitchen, and the instruments untouched, at a loss for how to proceed. Ten days until depart, if all goes as planned, and a visit planned to the new place in Tinyville this coming Wednesday so that I can check out the spring water source for the house, the main water lines, the property lines, and the wood shed. I’m hoping the owners will let me do a preliminary drop off at this visit, say one carload’s worth of boxes, so I can clear out the “living room” to provide enough space to remove the double-sized bookshelf I’ve been borrowing.
The house breathes in the crackling wind. The fire pops like corn, flames licking the glass door of the woodstove in constant hunger. It is quiet but for the movement of emotions, the clattering of the mind at work, the crumbling of a psychological foundation as one sense of place obeys time and gives way to another. I remember Mel’s advice again: “You’re the writer. You carry your home with you.”