Tips for moving and packing

You’ll learn a lot about a person if you pack up their house. The brand of toilet paper they buy, where they keep precious objects, their level of commitment to glassware. I imagine most people who can afford to hire someone to pack for them do so because they consider their time too valuable to be spent on tedious work that involves tape and cardboard. Or maybe they are generally disorganized and lack the project planning skills required. Packing up a house or apartment can be archaeological, which is why you may want someone else to do it, so you’re not sifting through old memories of found objects. Those things need to be in boxes. There’s no time for sentimentality if you want things pack efficiently - reminisce when you are unpacking, at the new place.

Categorization and labeling is something I enjoy. These items, from this room, in this box. Taped, labeled, ready for transport. Not too heavy, like with like, well protected if fragile. Then, on to the next. It’s a bit like a puzzle, a spatial awareness game where you imagine how all of the objects around you will look when they are moved and re-sorted, tucked away in cubical containers. Tetris at scale. Books are fun to pack because you get to see someone’s entire library, making mental notes on what they read or have read. A rookie mistake is to fill a medium or large size box with books. Don’t do this. Books are heavy, so you must always favor a small box.

I am skilled in the art of moving and a savant when it comes to packing, if that’s a thing. It’s likely that all of the moves we made as a military family left an impression on me. I don’t recall much about packing up, but I do remember the moving truck arriving at our new house, movers unloading, boxes on dollies coming down metal ramps. I remember my Dad’s frustration when items would arrive broken or missing pieces. The Army paid for movers, but not the best movers.

I wrote about moving to Olympia, in the early chapters of the book manuscript I’m working on. I’m talking about the idea of home, something I didn’t find until my late 20s. Olympia has been my home for about 16 years now. This town is a part of my life story so it’s mentioned to add more depth and context. Here’s an unedited excerpt from that chapter:

I wandered for so many years because there were no formative experiences of home. There were houses where we lived, a new one every few years, in a new town. But the experiences of my parents and their parents, my friends who were from somewhere - these were foreign to me. I was from a lot of different places, I didn’t have a clear answer to that question ”Where are you from?” because the idea of home was conceptual. After my cancer year, I understood that I was home, finally. I’d lived in this town for more years than any other, but now I was firmly rooted.

Yesterday I was writing in the early morning, sitting on a couch in an apartment building’s common space. I decided to split chapter 6 into two and now I’m working on 8, which is mostly set in 2022, an important and eventful year. I am close to the halfway mark - 25,000 words. Reading this book might be like opening a set of boxes, carefully packed stories from a decade in someone else’s life.

A memoir needs a good title and I have no clue what mine will be, perhaps I’ll have a revelatory moment after the manuscript is complete. Or maybe a cherished reader will catch something I missed that is title worthy. I am also thinking about visuals - the cover design and little illustrations that might sit next to chapter titles. A technique I’ve been using while writing is revisiting my photo library, only briefly, for the period of time where my chapters are set. I don’t imagine I’ll include actual photos in this book, but I certainly have some amusing ones that relate to the stories being told.

Recently, I was on a train, seated next to a woman in her late 50s perhaps, who was headed to Portland. She noticed I was writing and asked about that of course. I mentioned I was working on a memoir, she begins to tell me all about a book she had discovered, written by an ancestor who had immigrated to the US in the middle of the 19th century. In it, this man tries to sign up for wars, moves to new cities, leaves farms and starts new ones, and he travels great distances, all on foot. He mentions this detail throughout the book, which sounded like an autobiography. I can’t really imagine moving to a new place by walking there, but I guess you’d have a lot less to pack.

Sometimes I imagine our little house being packed up. I’ve died because the cancer got me, but my body is still useable and the medical students will benefit. Before Lindsay moves, cherished friends flip through vinyl records, and take a few. Same with books, some of which I’ve probably earmarked for certain people. And then there’s the shop full of tools, I know plenty of friends who will use and care for them. There are things I give away posthumously, things my wife will keep to remember me by. It’s helpful to not be so attached, to things, because they are ephemeral, all of the moving probably taught me this. It seems possible that copies of this book, the one I’m working on, will be packed up one day, after I’m gone. Hopefully, in small sized boxes.