I can pack the basement in an hour. A box of family snapshots takes half a day. : Moving Day Opens Up an Emotional Mine Field
It was the least of moves--a relatively simple shift from one West Valley address to another a few blocks away in Canoga Park. In fact, the only thing that distinguished it was that, since this is Southern California, the crew had previously transported the worldly goods of Barbra Streisand (a wonderful person, they assured me).
But even this modest move did what such transitions always do. It caused the mover’s entire life to pass before her eyes.
It’s not the heavy lifting that makes this process so exhausting. The tough part is the confrontation with the ghosts of past selves and favorite others, which pop out at you from boxes that are normally and prudently kept in the darkest recesses of your closets.
I’ve done this often enough to know that the only sure sanctuary from mover’s trauma is the kitchen.
Even if you’re fond of your kitchen, there is nothing in it that will rip your heart out. (Unless, of course, you’ve been foolish enough to leave ancient finger paintings on the refrigerator door.)
Cuisinarts and other small appliances inspire no emotion stronger than a certain capitalistic satisfaction at being able to perform minor household tasks in the costliest manner possible short of hiring domestic staff. Nobody ever shed tears over her napkin rings, even the wedding-gift ones that lasted longer than the marriage. And you can pack tea strainers, spatulas and one-quart saucepans from here to Tuesday at no psychic cost. The worst that will happen is you’ll die of boredom with a colander in your hand.
But the rest of the house is an emotional mine field. It is ready to detonate without warning, destroying the equanimity that we so sorely need if we are to remember to send out all the change-of-address notices necessary if we ever hope to see mail again.
In anticipation of the moving van, you begin sorting through a box innocuously marked “Miscellaneous.” Miscellaneous, you discover, includes a plaster of Paris handprint wrapped in crayon-decorated construction paper. You had forgotten that anyone in your household once welcomed a new box of crayons as eagerly as if it were a new Porsche (as long as it was the big box that had gold, silver, flesh and a rainbow of browns with artistic, Italianate names like burnt sienna, the one with the built-in crayon sharpener).
More important, you had forgotten that anyone in your household once had such small hands.
It’s only 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and you still have all this packing to do. Why do you suddenly feel that you have to take a nap?
Sorting clothes is another task as tricky as juggling snakes. Shoes are harmless enough. Even Cinderella wouldn’t choke up over the footwear of the past. But newly excavated garments, especially those you once loved, are so much moth-prone plastique.
Did this really fit, you ask yourself, examining an improbably scant miniskirt that made you feel irresistible for most of 1969. And whatever possessed you to keep an illustrated history of your body, even if you did have the good sense to hide it in the closet in the guest room?
But clothing is nothing compared to photographs.
I can pack the basement in an hour. A box of family snapshots takes half a day.
The box of photos is the one thing I will grab for the day Canoga Park begins to shake. The pictures are all of people smiling. And yet of the dozens of emotions revealed forever in them, none is simple pleasure.
There is a picture of a boyish-looking aviator in a fleece-and-leather flight jacket. My father sent this self-portrait home in 1944 from somewhere in the South Pacific. While he lived, his progeny always referred to it as Dad’s Junior Birdman picture. Naturally, we squabbled over it when he died.
His militant pose suggests that Junior Birdman is prepared to bomb Emperor Hirohito back to the Stone Age. But the eyes of the warrior are soft and uncertain. When I look at it, I can smell his flight jacket as clearly as if the photo were perfumed.
There is a snapshot of my mother, taken by her sister on the day my parents married. The bride wears a Joan Crawford suit with huge shoulders and an improbable white hat that appears to be fashioned entirely from gardenias.
Having known her for a lifetime, I would have expected her to radiate a seemly joy on experiencing Holy Matrimony. But this photo captures her at a moment when she looks downright sly.
There is no “put the blame on Mame” blatancy in her look, just a sultry confidence in the power beauty gives her. As later photos demonstrate, the crinolined fashions of the 1950s would never flatter her as that wartime suit did. I wonder if the bride looks so amused and dangerous because she has just discovered the plus side of rationing. Patriotic parsimony dictated that skirts barely skim the knee and allowed the person who would be my mother to show a great deal of her remarkable legs.
Each photo contains a novel.
I always pack them carefully and last, along with a plaster of Paris handprint that the movers never seem to understand is priceless.
