Trailing Off....: A Homebody Finds a Home

Here's a confession: I am a packrat. In a collection of boxes in my mother's garage attic, an assortment of treasures is slowly decaying and being consumed by whatever lives in garage attics: homework from elementary school, passed notes (remember no mobile phones then!) from friends and boys in junior high, ticket stubs, dried corsages, rocks, marbles, bad poetry, and thrift store classics. I kept everything, as if I were seized by a childhood clairvoyance that I would one day not be able to remember where I left my keys or why I walked into the kitchen let alone what my childhood self dreamed about.

In my 20's after every new career, educational, or relationship pursuit ran its course and/or failed, I packed my belongings and treasures (which now included grown up stuff like framed pictures, linen, and cooking gear) into computer paper boxes, and loaded them into my mom's trusty minivan to be unpacked at a new, usually smaller abode. But some stuff was forced into exile in the garage attic, too useless to fit into the new place, but too dear to part with.

In the last 10 years, I've had a dozen or so apartments in 5 countries. Packing up and shipping boxes of useful things like sweaters, rice cookers, and sheets seemed pointless and expensive, let alone any memorabilia or knickknacks accumulated along the way. Ok, I did send some stuff (the poster from the propaganda museum in Shanghai is way too cool to just leave behind!) to mom's warehouse in Iowa, but mostly I limited myself to one bag of necessary and favourite garments and left the rest for the next temporary teacher to sort through. And besides, each new place on the ESL trail was usually equipped with its own set of gently or roughly worn linen and cookware.

When living abroad, I always did a few things to make the furnished apartment more "homey" such as put up pictures, stock the kitchen with my favourite spices and cooking tools, get a plant, place some smell good candles about, and put on soft and cozy linen on whatever passed for the bed. But it was always with the feeling that it would all be temporary and there was no need to go too crazy. And though I still collected treasures like shells and other bits and bobs from the beaches, museum brochures, beer mats, cards from students, and various ticket stubs, I found it easier than before to put them in the bin when possessed by a cleaning fever.

Some might think: Ah, she learned the valuable lesson that things we cannot take with us are not important in this life; it's the relationships and the memories that are of value. WRONG. One of the most idiosyncratic aspects of my character is that though I have itchy feet and love to roam the world, I am also a homebody who likes to be at home surrounded by my things. I found this to be especially true in countries where being outside was so horrible (choking smog, noisy traffic, thousands of people crammed onto a tiny, dirty sidewalk) that I needed a sanctuary that was peaceful and contained at least a few things that reminded me of who me is. And in every new place, the packrat in me missed being able to sit down on a rainy day and go through a box of tangible memories, junk or not. I never learned any lessons about how freeing it is to be unencumbered with stuff; it was just that logistically, I couldn't have a lot.

So here I am in the present, married and living in a place that is "home" for as long as family and employers want us here. When we moved into our current apartment, it was with the knowledge that it might all be temporary. After all, the field of ESL teaching has a lot of turnover and is dependent upon the economies of the students' countries. The business is seasonal and only a small percentage of teachers are given (or even want) permanent contracts. We signed our lease knowing that at any time the work could dry up and we'd either have to start working at a hotel or call center (shudder) or venture back out into the field. However, I decided that because there was a stronger chance this might be more permanent, or maybe because I'd had enough of half-hominess, I would make it homier than our usual place.

We had known it was the right place immediately. It's in the city centre next to a cinema, away from the busiest streets, at a great price and very cosy. Some might say it's rather tiny. It is smaller than the apartments we had in the four countries we've lived together in, but it's so dang cute and cosy. And because it is furnished, I had to do a little extra to make it mine. So I called up Mom's Storage Facility in Iowa and had some of my collection of stuff sent to me and put it on the walls. I went a couple of blocks to buy my casserole dishes and a Dutch oven and went to the Asian markets to stock my pantry. Stuff is being stuffed into drawers and boxes for a later perusal. For the first time in years, I'm behaving as though I'm not going anywhere, because "here" is my favourite place to be.