Cardboard Boxes

Packing to move is an exercise in memories

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First there are the boxes with labels from past moves. Scribbled Sharpie instructions for this box to go in the dining room, this one to the guest bedroom. You scratch them out and re-write them. This one now goes in the kitchen, this one in the bathroom.

The boxes are beaten up and their corners are bent, crushed by doorframes that don’t move and movers who don’t care.

But those boxes contain the pieces of your life. The ones that you’ve kept and moved from Indiana to Mississippi to Ohio to Kentucky to Florida. A few moves ago, you let go of the basketball awards and the Spelling Bee trophy. You donated the chunky rainbow boots and some dresses you haven’t worn in years. But the photos of friendships and lovers past and the ashes of your sweet furry companions and your grandma’s clip-on earrings remain.

They continue the journey with you.

After a few hours of work, your back aches with the effort, and you understand that packing isn’t for those in the second half of their lives. It’s for the college student with a strong spine and a sculpted core and an unlimited future. It’s for the newlywed with stars in her eyes and the good china carefully cradled in bubble wrap. It’s for the young mother with a baby on her hip and another one ready to greet the world.

But you? You’ve been through this more times than you can count. The sorting. The selecting. The memories that are tied to every piece you choose to keep.

And also the ones you choose to let go.

There are your favorite ripped jeans that you vow to get back into someday. You’ve been saying it since 2016, but you give them one more folded ride in a cardboard box, just in case. Here are the clay pots your school-aged children formed painstakingly with their little hands decades ago. They are carefully crafted and colorfully painted; four perfectly imperfect little bowls. They make the journey again so they can hold your earrings, your rings, your favorite necklace, your heart.

As time marches on, you whittle down the objects you keep, but you keep the memories safe deep inside you.

Your heart can hold what your arms no longer can.

So you choose to carry fewer boxes each time you go.

And wherever you land, you’ll unpack your chosen treasures, piece by piece, and give them a new place to land in a new place to live.

And you’ll sit in a new chair in a cozy new corner with a heating pad on your weary, aching back, and you’ll put your book on your lap for a moment, and you’ll look around at everything you’ve carried, and you’ll remember.