THREE weeks to go. Presuming there isn’t any last-minute hitch, some catastrophic financial cock-up or I lose the keys, I’m moving house in 21 days.
No, wait, just 20 days now. That’s horrifying. There are still about three rooms to declutter before I get around to packing.
I’m beginning to realise why we haven’t moved for 20 years. This moving house thing, it turns out, isn’t much fun.
Two decades. Time enough to watch your kids grow up. Time enough to lose the person who mattered more to you than anyone else in the world to cancer. Time enough to realise, finally, that maybe you don’t need all these books you’ve gathered up over the years.
Daughter number two and I are not going far. Just up the road and around the corner. But it still feels like a huge shift. A marker of the end of one chapter of our lives. Daughter number one already moved out a few months ago. Life is change, I keep telling myself.
But I’ve not had time to be maudlin or think too much about what we’re leaving behind. Right now I’m just stressed out about whether we’ll move at all. Everywhere I look there is more stuff. How did we gather up so much stuff? How many IKEA bedside units does one house need? And what am I going to do with all of them?
Get rid, seems to be my default answer. I think the local charity shop is sick of the sight of me. The local dump too. I’ve been clearing out for weeks and I still don’t seem to be anywhere near the end of it.
On the upside, stress, it turns out, is a bit of an antidote to grief. For nearly three years I’ve not been able to even look at my late wife’s clothes without falling to bits. But when time is short and you’ve got a wardrobe to clear you suddenly find you can push through.
On the downside, these big life changes are depressingly revealing of character. Coincidentally, my best mate and his wife are moving from England to Scotland. They keep telling me about how they are using 3D models of their new house to make sure their furniture would fit in their new space. Such attention to detail. Me, I’ve just left all that to luck.
If I think about it I’m not sure I’ll miss this house I’m in now. Too many painful memories. And I haven’t quite got around to imagining what a new home might offer. I’m too bogged down in the trenches surrounded by ornaments and picture frames and pot plants.
What I’m learning, I guess, as I stick belongings that have been in this house as long as I have in a bin bag, is that we are not what we own after all. It’s one of those lessons some of us keep needing to relearn. One day, hopefully, it will sink in.
Right now, though, I’ve got a dozen bags of books to take to Oxfam.
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