I found a box under my desk today that I quickly realized has never been unpacked from when we moved here 18 months ago. It was a difficult move in many ways, the main one being that we had lived there for over 16 years, a gorgeous 12 room Victorian with too much storage space. At the time it was a practical decision and while I knew intellectually that I would miss the house I am still amazed at the level of disorientation/dislocation that still exists. When I need something I immediately mentally launch into “of course, it’s on the shelf on the stairs …. ” except that it’s not because we don’t live in that house anymore, and I have no idea where it is here, where we actually do live.
Opening the box was a little like opening a time capsule, or a recently unearthed object from another century. Everything looked vaguely familiar as though I’d studied the objects in a history course, or seen pictures of them in a family photo album from the old country. It was hard to remember that they were once an intimate part of our everyday lives. Yes, this framed photo of my father-in-law and toddler daughter. I have seen it before, but there is a dreamy quality to the memory as if it belonged to a far-away time not the fairly recent time that it does.
I miss the house also, of course, because I put so much time and effort into making it the way I wanted. We did a lot of renovation and custom changes because we thought we’d be there forever. It doesn’t feel like we lost money in a real estate sense but for me it feels as though I lost time, the time I spent looking at every tile store in the Chicago area, picking up ideas from magazines, friends houses, storing all those nuts away in my nest of ideas, waiting for the spring of construction.
