Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Keep on swimming

I have tried to write this post so many times now I have lost count. Every time I dissolve into helpless tears, which I guess isn't an unusual situation, but it seems like the status quo these days rather than an exception.

On the Friday before Memorial Day, our landlord came to me and told me that the house we live in was being sold, and we had until July to move out. On top of the impossible task of finding a new place to live - Sitka being notoriously short on affordable decent housing, I have been dealing with the grief I feel over losing my home. Now, eleven days before I have to close the door forever, I am weeping every day and I have reached to point where I am putting every last thing I encounter into a box to save, because my heart is too sore to send any more memories away.

When we moved into this place eight years ago, I had only ever lived in one house longer than two years. When I was a child, we moved very often, a consequence of my mother being in the army and of her own inability to put down roots. I attended thirteen schools in my thirteen years of schooling and was homeschooled for half a year. I never knew what would survive one move to the next. I don't have my baby books, or the gourd lady my Grandmama brought us from Peru, or any of my favorite picture books from when I was a child. I don't have my prom shoes or my hand-embroidered baby blankets.All lost in the shuffle from place to place.

So when I started the monumental task of reducing the life I made for my children and me in this house to labelled boxes and a gargantuan pile destined for the garage sale, I was paralyzed at the idea of throwing any of this away. I still am. I know it sounds silly, but the abandoned blocks at the corners of my craft room were the happy hours my baby girl contented bounced in her chair while I sewed her brother's Christmas gift. The glittered stars were the magic of Santa that my son learned was in his heart, not in the North Pole. I don't want to sell the light-up shoes my mom bought to bribe her to ride her bike. I don't want to see the coveted Jedi robe on some other kid's arm. I know that when I send away the squeaky ladybug, that memory of opening a box from Lacy and finding them inside will be gone, too. I won't have the object to fire the memory.

So I cry, and I find it impossible to part with another thing. I am so tired of trying to let this all go.

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