the move

Moving across the country is tough. It is overwhelming to move ones entire life, including two cats, from Point A to Point B using just a small SUV and a moving crate. My husband and I have lived in our current apartment for 5 years nearly to the day. The amount of stuff we've accumulated is absurd and I am secretly a little disgusted with how much of it isn't in daily use. I've always favored simplicity of environment but there are things one needs to have safety and security and to be equipped for a moderately active adult life in the PNW meaning our modest apartment has been packed to the gills. As we are moving from over-cast and waterlogged Seattle to high and dry Flagstaff, a major reassessment is taking place of what we need, what we may need and what will just be silly in the high country of Northern Arizona. Three umbrellas? Probably unnecessary.  Tsunami survival kit? Absolutely not. 15 assorted coffee mugs? Two slow-cookers? Envelopes and crafts from our wedding invitations (circa 2010)? Multiple china sets from the grandparents? All too much. I grew up in a household of some excess and, unfortunately, some waste. Things came and went with such a frequency that I have a slight revulsion towards the consumerism that so drives our country and characterized my childhood. All these remnants of a consumer culture, duplicates and multiples of kitchen appliances that perform the same task, an army of half full bottles of household chemicals, obscure wedding gifts we never appreciated, board games bought and used once, have significance but I'm not sure that meaning will transfer to our new life in Flagstaff. Not only are we moving to a different geographical region, both our life roles will be shifting from worker bees to full-time students, a change that will bring about unique needs, long since forgotten, and render obsolete whole facets of our lifestyle. I have the closed-minded habit, as my husband so well-meaningly points out, of declaring myself 'above' culture sometimes. Once something is 'figured out', anthropologically speaking, I sometimes lose interest and struggle to locate purpose. I feel this way towards things like social media and technology, for example. I appreciate the fact that these are two very 'constructed' divisions of our lives and this makes me a little more independent from them than the next person. I am not advocating this is the right way to live, as I sorely miss out on many benefits of both, but it does allow a degree of freedom from social constructions and this freedom allows for meaningful contemplation. I crave this freedom from other things as well, gifts for example, and can theoretically argue against holding on to a useless gift by a sort of 'caveman' logic of only the crudest repertoire of 'things' being necessary. Contradictory to this so-called logic (for it really is not all that logical, I admit) is my admiration for Marcel Mauss's The Gift, which I read in my very first anthropology class ever. Mauss teaches that a gift is so much more than utility and prospect. It is a social act, as is its receipt. And so, here I sit, with a great number of gifts and other social accumulations that I can both argue for and against keeping. As if intellectually I wasn't in enough of a bind, pragmatics are pushing me against severe spacial limitations. What cannot fit in our moving crate should be considered to go in our car with us. If not, it is considered to stay with our parents, whom I'm sure are anxious about these considerations themselves. In sum, moving ones life, neigh, a life built together with another life over 7 years, in addition to two mini-lives that require their own unique outfit (cat food, litter box, treats, harnesses, beds, toys) is a practical challenge as much as an intellectual one. In reducing our lives to what can be reasonably shipped across the country we articulate values, morals and beliefs that truly speak to who we are. For fear of this, packing our apartment is a somber exploration of what life has made out of us, be it rich and meaningful or excessive and silly.