Those of you with long memories or well-exercised scrolling wheels will note that it’s been exactly two years since I’d last written about moving from one home to another.  As expected then, yes, I once again find myself living in a hotel in a new place, while everything my family’s ever owned is either nearby in local storage or being pushed our way across the Pacific Ocean.  It’s a little crazy to think about, but we’re making what for me will be move number twenty-five!

It helps, this time around, that I’m moving back to a location I’m very familiar with, and a job I’ve long looked forward to doing.  As well, the stability that comes from a three-year assignment is welcome and allows some realistic planning for the future as I creep up on mandatory retirement.

Still, each move forces you to do something that can, in fact, be quite difficult.  It provides the opportunity—if not an incentive—to go through your “things” and get rid of those that no longer hold any value.  Now, this is a fairly subjective thing, isn’t it?  If a given object held no value for you it probably wouldn’t still be on hand come moving time in the first place.  Yet that’s not how real life works, does it?

The stuff we find ourselves sifting through fits several categories that each must be considered and handled differently.  There are documents and receipts related to family finances or—perhaps more importantly—related to taxes.  There are those things that meant something at the time you tucked them away:  a ticket stub from a memorable concert, the pamphlet acquired at an incredible historical site, the table name card from a particularly high-brow dinner you want to remember.  Then there are those things that just end up in the “keep” box simply because the bin was nearby when a pocket or purse needed to be emptied.  It’s this last category especially that causes a mad filing drill prior to each move, separating the wheat from the chaff and shredding anything containing personal information.

While it’s easy to get at those items, separating the trash from those bits you want to preserve, the second category is trickier by far.  Tucking away a printed program for an especially enjoyable event just makes sense in the mellow after-glow of the concert, performance, or whatever.  But fast-forward a year and sometimes I can barely even remember the event in question.  Going through these “meant something at the time” bits of odds and ends forces you to reassess just how important it really was to you after all, and, often as not, ends up with the item being tossed.

This process isn’t limited to printed materials, but takes place each move as things either survive another culling or not, making their way either to the new place, or being voted off the island, so-to-speak.  Shoes, backpacks, aging electronics, nothing is spared the critical gaze of a moving spouse, and the intended result is a slimmed-down list of belongings that STILL takes pages to tabulate.

Yet the winnowing process itself does something funny to you along the way.  While some of the events are barely memorable a year on, others stick with you and I find myself sitting amidst multiple piles—“taxes”, “car”, “official documents”, “insurance”, etc.—holding a single ticket stub, fond memories filling my mind’s eye and taking me right back to it.  Having just tossed several metric tons of “junk” I sit there staring at a single one by three inch slip of paper and hesitate to throw it out.  Weird, right?

It’s a little strange how that works, how such strong emotion can be attached to such an apparently unimportant physical object, but it happens again and again.  I don’t generally consider myself terribly nostalgic, but even I can’t deny there’s something … I don’t know what … but something there that makes us hesitate to throw away that tiny piece of paper.

Again it makes me reflect on our nature, how our brains process certain types of information, and how some information attains such prominence in our memory.  Of course, the opposite is true as well, isn’t it, but one doesn’t generally hesitate to discard remnants of a truly horrible experience, almost as if tossing the physical evidence of it helps us to move past the event and go on with life unaffected.

Maybe the negative example offers a clue as to why we agonize over the more positive keepsakes.  Just as tossing the ticket stub from an awful movie date offers some closure, maybe by holding on to the positively-charged physical item we hope to hold onto the memory itself, intentionally avoiding closure.  This would make the pre-move process of deciding in rapid succession which memories to toss and which to keep a fairly profound moment, to be repeated again and again over the course of multiple moves.

It all makes me wonder whether that process has some psychological impact on us as we hop from station-to-station, job-to-job, and country-to-country.  That said, most people who know me well would likely say not to worry about it since “sane” and “normal” aren’t generally adjectives used to describe me anyway!  Still, I do wonder.

In the end, however, having gone through that process, we’ll enter our new home soon and receive, unpack, and organize the survivors of 2019’s culling.  We’ll lovingly place nick-knacks on shelves, hang pictures on walls, and arrange the family files in a safe location.  This time around we’ll re-take possession of goods that have been in storage for thirteen years, offering the rare experience of opening our very own time capsule, allowing us to compare the values we hold today with those we held when much, much younger.  And, as odd as it is to say that something we’ve lived without for so many years is important to us, there are things I’m really looking forward to see come off that moving truck.

So, another year, another move.  What’s new?  For all my military brothers and sisters out there, that’s just become “normal” and is part of our professional circle of life.  To you and all my American compatriots out there, I wish you a Happy Independence Day!  To everyone else … uh … I guess … Happy Thursday!

M.G. Haynes