New home blues. Boxes awaiting unpacking, stashed in the new home's blue room. (Photo by Audrey Hackett)
BLOG— New home blues
- Published: December 8, 2015
The happiest things are tinged with sadness, you know? Change is loss. And sadness is the small dark pit in the fleshy fruit of joy, the lump in joy’s wide and wild-singing throat.
We moved last week, to a home we bought, a home of our own. Talk about joy! But instead I’m drawn to talk about sadness.
Boxing up our things for one more move — we’ve done three in our nine years together, not counting the move that joined our two households into one — was a kind of sadness. Life feels fragile when it’s bundled into boxes, especially when it’s bundled into boxes marked “FRAGILE,” a poignant convergence of packing parlance and metaphor. Packing is hard, everyone says, but really — isn’t it shockingly easy how quickly a life can be dismantled and stowed? On our last night in the old house last week, my husband and I sat on the couch together facing a five-foot wall of boxes. “It’s like being on an airplane,” he said of the lack of legroom, and the overall sense of nonnegotiable tight space. The seats were wider and more comfortable, though. I pictured us taking off, the house a dark, squat bird with all our life’s cargo in its hold…
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Read the rest of today’s post in the Dec. 10 issue of the Yellow Springs News. The writer of this blog isn’t the only one making a move! The blog itself will be moving over to paper and ink, appearing as a regular column in the print edition of the News. See you in black and white!
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