Another field trip to the box factory

My mother's birthday is today and so I went home to have dinner with my family in the suburbs. Having lived in my parent's house for 6 painful, claustrophobic months, I now avoid the place like the plague, but you can't avoid the birthdays. Half of my life is still in boxes in their basement and so every time I visit, I end up rummaging around looking for something that's suddenly started haunting me with its absence. Tonight it was cooking utensils. My new roommate doesn't cook (which is one reason we're a good pair) and this means our kitchen, which she populated with dishes, pans and a startling dearth of useful appliances, often lacks something I took for granted in my old apartment in LA. Such as spatulas. Or the neat little roller thing that takes the skin off garlic. Or a hand blender. The other week I tried to make banana bread and I almost burned out the regular blender trying to get the stupid dry stuff to mix with the wet stuff. So on this trip home, I dug up my nice whisk and my mother's ancient hand blender, which dates from the 60s but still works like a charm.

The pile of boxes in the basement is a monument to past, present and future. The day the movers delivered all my stuff from LA, I refused to leave my room and so my father had to make sure that everything was there and that the mover got paid. I just couldn't watch them take my things off the truck. There was something like a time warp going on in my brain--I could not grasp that my dresser was now in the basement and not in our bedroom in LA. It was just so wrong. Everything about it was wrong. I wanted it to go back. I wanted to go back myself. What had I done? Had I left too abruptly and made a panicked snap decision? My life was in LA and what the hell was I doing in Boston? Poor Higgypiggy endured about two months of teary phone calls that revolved around whether I had done the right thing. What it came down to was that as long as my stuff was in LA, I could still go back and nothing was really over. As soon as it arrived, EVERYTHING was over and beginning again all at the same time, but the new thing wasn't something I wanted anything to do with. My life, my love, my job, my friends, my volunteer work, my stairs and yoga were all 3,000 miles away and now my stuff was in Boston and my world was chaos.

For a long time, my furniture sat in the garage and I could not look at it. Literally could not look at it, much less move it somewhere dry or out of the way. Then, when I finally got up the courage to open some of the boxes to get some tax paperwork, it was like opening a time capsule. There was the box full of my desk stuff from work. There were the DVDs I'd hastily grabbed from the mantel. There was the candle that belonged to Glenn but that my mother had accidentally packed. There was the picture of us sitting on top of Sandstone Peak, smiling like we were on speed and bathed in the late afternoon sun. I had to go through those boxes a lot before I moved out, and the first few times were prolonged paroxysms of grief, where I'd open a box and double over in tears before I could actually sort through the stuff. How could this have happened? Nothing made sense.

It's been almost 8 months since The Breakup and now those boxes are nothing but a huge pain in the ass. My mother packed most of them and now I have to do serious rummaging in order to find anything. But I have realized exactly how little I really need in order to get by, and come spring I'm going down to that basement and Cleaning House. I spent 3.5 years nesting and now I don't want any of it. When the time comes to nest again, I want to start from scratch. I want to be box-free.