A bit before his fifth birthday, my husband Steve and I pumped son Jesse up with a steady flow of compliments about how grown up he was and how he’d be a really big boy when he turned five. We thought we were doing the right thing in giving him something to look forward to. But on the anticipated day, Jesse stood in front of the mirror in tears. “What’s wrong?” we asked, genuinely surprised. “I look just the same!” Jesse wailed, staring at the reflection of his still-small self. Only a few hours, a new set of Legos, and a piece of cake made him settle back into his more familiar childhood.
That story has come to mind more than once this week as John and I have begun unpacking the many, many boxes that have finally arrived from California. We have spent the last month sleeping on air mattresses, measuring and mapping empty rooms, filling them in our minds’ eyes with all of our favorite things. And somehow in the process, that accumulation of ‘stuff’ over 70 years of living took on more polish and shine in our imaginations as it bounced across the highways of America. Everything we owned was going to fit perfectly and look better than ever. This is a grown-up house, we thought; our belongings would look more ‘grown-up,’ too.
But after the movers left, and we had spent a few hours shoving boxes and furniture around, we found ourselves a bit deflated and confused. It’s not just that we were tired, for certainly we were. It’s not just that the reality of the work ahead was finally hitting, for I think we were pretty well prepared for what will lie ahead in the coming weeks. It was a feeling uncomfortable to admit, a feeling we discovered we both shared: our ‘stuff’ was still our stuff, for better and for worse, and no new house was going to make them different than they have always been; no house will turn us into people different (better?) than we were when this journey eastward first began.
But as our books begin to fill the shelves, and our paintings rest against the walls waiting to remind us of who we are and what we love, we find that we have come to know (with some relief), and are hereby happy to report that we are still the same.