This coming Saturday – if all goes well – I will move into my fourth home in four months. I am finding all the moving – and the many other unknowns in my life – a bit stressful. There are some really great things about living here in the “Happy Valley,” as some call the Pioneer Valley. I am much calmer, for one – by my own assessment, and by that of other people who talk to and see me. There are bunnies on the library lawn in the evening. People are friendly and courteous, make eye contact, and smile (which – it must be said – delighted me for the first three weeks or so, but which I am now finding a bit overwhelming; I’m longing for the personal space that New Yorkers claim and are given automatically). Here the pedestrian rules the world, rather than being a target for angry drivers. I can almost always sleep through the night, uninterrupted by street fights, sirens, or domestic abuse taking place on my street corner. I can take a walk without getting hooted at or having to always look behind me (although I still do). I can drive 15 minutes and go swim in a lake whenever I want, rather than having to make a whole day of it and spend $50 to take public transportation to a beach. My kitty gets to spend her days watching lots of squirrels and birds out the window, rather than just the occasional pigeon. These things are lovely.
On the downside, it’s white, white, white, and very homogenous. I desperately miss the cultural diversity of NYC, and the wonderful Babel tower of languages that always surrounded me there. Also – I miss my friends. So, so much. And the way I always run into people I know on the street. And I miss all the things and places I know. After 14+ years of NYC living, I know where to go to get almost anything there. Here, I don’t even know where the best/closest places are to get lightbulbs (Walmart? Really?), key copies, photocopies, massage, or shave ice. Further, anyone who knows me knows that I am TERRIBLE at dealing with change. Intellectually, I know it’s good, and necessary, and inevitable; emotionally, I completely freak out, no matter how big or small the change is. So this was a big one.
When I moved, I tried so hard to purge as many of my possessions as possible. I failed miserably, being a hopeless pack rat, but one thing I did at the time that I was so proud of was get rid of my mismatching dishes. I was kindly given a beautiful set of matching dishes by Jeff and Megan, and I thought – oh, these are grownup dishes. In my new home, I can have people over for a meal, and I’ll lay out a beautiful grownup tablecloth, and I’ll cook (!), and I’ll serve the food on my beautiful grownup matching dishes. It was a good plan. After much anguish, I parted with my dishes, which were partly randomly inherited, but were partly my grandparents’ dishes. (Don’t worry; nothing valuable. Monetarily, at least.) They were yellow stoneware, not particularly pretty, and not even close to a full set.
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| (This is not one of the dishes. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name, so can't find an image. Stoneware...yellow...?) |
But now…I would pay so much money to have those ugly yellow dishes back. The same exact ones that were my grandparents’, then mine – not a new, full set of the same kind. I felt like they were home, they made me me, they helped me know where and who I was. Those dishes have been with me the whole 14 years I’ve been living on my own. I don’t know who I am with these new dishes. Maybe they match someone I would like to be (matching, pretty, “grownup”) but not the person I still feel like I am (messy, mismatching, imperfect). I know it’s silly to long for dishes – especially when there were only 2-3 of each kind left, and they weren’t pretty – but out of all the things I gave away, I miss those the most.
There is a poem that has been circling through my head since I moved to this apartment; I read it in The Sun Magazine, and miraculously found that I had made a copy of it and put it in my files:
After a Move
Patrick Donnelly
These are not my keys,
this is not my door.
I’m so tired, I could sleep anyplace,
but this is not my bed.
This is not my street,
not my face,
not my dirt
where someone’s hand
touched the wall again and again
to help themselves down the stairs.
These are not my eyes,
not my leaves, not my light,
nothing like the view I knew.
These words are not mine,
none of this food is mine,
And when I asked for the kind of sandwich I liked
the man behind the counter said simply:
No.
A-yup. Know exactly how you feel. And every time it happens to me, I get to remind myself (usually far too late to do me a bit of good) that it's not the dishes (or books, or clothing, or precious knick-knacks) that I regret leaving behind, but who I was - that person they remind me of. Don't know if that's the case here, but it sure does remind me of me.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I wonder if our families had the same stoneware, yellow dishes for years and years...?