What We Pack
My friend and I drove up to Bozeman over the weekend to see my son, who moved north with his girlfriend for another mountain town with lower rents. Now headed home, the car is full with our Costco staples and the baggage required to bring two dogs along. They take up more space than we do, but I promised my son they would come.
We are surrounded by country so green it vibrates, the big sky opening up, clouds providing contrast so we can watch ravens and hawks move like feathered Etch-A-Sketch artists. We laugh a lot, my friend and me. We have known each other since fourth grade, and with her I am completely free.
I think back to the conversation the night before — my son, my friend, my son’s girlfriend, and me — talking about jobs, new apartments, the hassle and stress of moving, the tyranny of Jackson’s housing market. Remarkably, I have come to know something about this feeling, having rented out the home where my former spouse and I raised our family in exchange for something that felt lighter.
The house — once a place of security — had become oppressive, with shadows echoing of a different time — pencil marks on the garage wall that marked each son’s height when they started to shoot up, the heart shape they’d drawn around “mom” next to their own names they’d drawn in wet concrete. The basketball hoop in the driveway had gone quiet.
Now I live in a light-filled live-work perch above town, free to make the space what I want, unencumbered by history.
There is, of course, a catch. The lease runs ten months, allowing for the fact that my landlord loves the Tetons as much as the rest of us, and returns every summer. In July and August, I evacuate.
I do my best to take only the essentials and store the rest which requires double math. Already, I realize I have put the dress I planned to wear to my aunt’s memorial into storage. I share a thin laugh over this with a friend in my writing group, who is also housing-stressed. This drumbeat of not knowing where you will land or where your belongings are when you need them is constant background noise. It’s a sound familiar to too many.
I think back on last year, when I plopped into a friend’s vacant home, equipped with everything I could need. Still, I was unsettled. I carefully set up my office, my closet, even many of my books, in an effort to give myself some protection from feeling like a nomad. Each morning, I woke with the light and took the dogs out. I looked at the mountains and listened to my footfall, instinctively needing to feel the ground under me, to orient myself with the north star of the Grand Teton. For one stretch of each day — that stretch of walking, breathing, listening — I found respite from the anxiety of change.
This year, I notice in late spring that I’m already packing mentally, and mentally packing. I use the trick of labeling thoughts “helpful” or “unhelpful,” and feel a slight panic when it becomes clear that basically all of mine are unhelpful. I stop what I’m doing and go outside. The pause helps, but not for long. I have to practice this over and over, until I’m finally able to laugh at how ludicrous it is to feel so much angst over putting some things in boxes, and then taking those things back out.
My brain and body work in tandem to signal how much they prefer predictability. It’s a vicious cycle: my body does its sneaky little tricks — butterflies, tight shoulders, prods to stay on alert — and my mind follows suit, spinning out on how much there is to do, how little time is left to do it, how this is just never going to work.
I know this is just outdated evolutionary software. Though I am in no danger of anything except inconvenience, my “reptilian brain” glitches out at the unfamiliar. I go back to the “helpful, unhelpful” practice and throw a little gas on it. I list every good thing I can think of that started as unfamiliar: moving to Jackson. Learning to ski. Adopting dogs. Starting a business, a nonprofit, motherhood. Winning an election. Losing one. I give my body data to prove there is nothing inherently dangerous about change. Changing the place where I sleep is certainly not.
I’ll admit these mental fitness tricks, while they help, are annoyingly slow — nowhere near the dopamine jolt I get from reaching for chocolate. But I wake up a few days before the moving truck is scheduled and realize I feel okay. I feel fine. There are boxes of organized chaos everywhere, but this time I pack light. I stop thinking about everything that might be in the wrong place and get on friendly terms with the messiness.
On the morning of the move, the pile of what’s coming with me for the next two months is respectably meager. My mind starts feeding me nonsense and just as I am about to get lost in made-up catastrophes my phone buzzes with texts from loved ones with loving messages. “Anything I can do?” and “I love you” and “You got this, Mom.”
What dawns on me now is what a slow learner I am. I have what is essential with me and it doesn’t need to be marked “fragile.”