Stuff

Again I find myself buried in STUFF. Six months ago, just after celebrating an early Christmas on the day after Thanksgiving in Djibouti, we packed up our entire house. I thought I might never recover. Now, for those of you who are thinking, "Don't they have movers do that? How hard can it really be?" have not done this yourselves or are superhuman species. For regular people like me, who really like to be able to find a fork to eat with and a matching pair of socks, moving tests me to the extreme.

Already this move is different, however. For one, we gave away so much stuff before leaving Africa we are a bit lighter this time around -- though it certainly doesn't feel that way. For another, the unpackers (removers, as they call them here) were really quite superb. They spoke my language, joked around with the kids, and even assembled our king bed and other things requiring tools I have yet to put my fingers around. We no longer have a "warehouse" (as my dad calls it) like we did in Djibouti -- a spare bedroom filled with nothing but shelves of food, toilet paper, toothpaste, Band-Aids and Jell-O pudding. We have locally available goods and limited storage space, so an occasional trip to the grocery store is surprisingly sufficient.

Okay, so if you could see my house, you would know what I mean. We've spent days trying to make some form of order and it hardly looks like we've begun. In fact, the day the movers came and I was near exhaustion when Ravi came home from school -- he immediately said, "Boy, you must have just got started!" For one thing, the movers in Djibouti bubble-wrapped each item individually then wrapped again with packing tape. Try unloading an entire kitchen of bubble wrapped items -- it's a good thing they wrapped the napkins and my 25-cent tin bread pans from DI. We could put on a pretty good fireworks show with the amount of bubble wrap we have leftover.

Where did we get all this stuff and what do we do with it? I consider myself a most organized person -- it's one attribute I feel I have. Moving tests even the best of us, and I'm challenged each time by finding the right balance between what to save, what to use, what to give away, what to throw away. After living out of suitcases for the past 4 months, I'm ready to have my own muffin tins and 9x13 pans. However, what goes in is only as good as what comes out. As I unpack the sheets, pillowcases, towels, bathmats, and my own wardrobe -- I ask myself, "When did these get so old? So frayed? So faded?" I feel the need to start completely over -- but how foolish when we've waited all this time for our belongings that are to help us feel at home again, right? If we really wanted to start over, why bring all this in the first place?

Ultimately, once the dust settles, it will feel like home. The kids especially remind me of that. It's fun to see what they remember and cherish and what they don't remember at all. We may not ever need to buy a new toy -- we just put their current ones away for months on end, and when they show up again it's like Christmas. For Yared, everything is new.

As always, it's the people inside that make a home, not the stuff surrounding us.

I did, interestingly, find my pillow and am now sleeping on it nightly. It doesn't feel like my own pillow anymore, however. Better run -- I've got some socks to find (and kids to find too).