to be sorted later #26

in which I still haven't moved, yet

“I did not feel safe or unsafe, but somewhere in-between, liminal, passing from one life to another.” — Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living

Moving: another kind of haunting

It’s exciting to consider that a week from today, I’ll be done moving, and there will be brand new tasks to procrastinate and fret over that I haven’t even considered yet. For now, the cats and I are surrounded by boxes, bags, my to-do lists, Middlemarch, and my library copy of The Cost of Living.

There’s probably never a bad time to read Deborah Levy, I’m learning, but what better time than the present to read this slim memoir detailing the time Levy is moving into a new home following her divorce, all while she’s on “an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world”?

Like I sometimes do, I got it backwards with Levy, and am reading her “living autobiography” series in reverse order, having started with Real Estate, and now The Cost of Living. Once I’m in my new home, and have figured out my new preferred library branch, I suppose I better grab the first one, Things I Don’t Want to Know, and then inevitably quote it in an upcoming “to be sorted later” post!

Although Levy talks about how her new home is becoming “literally smaller” as mine is about to become literally bigger, and she is uncoupling and living alone for the first time in many years as I am doing the opposite, I too, have begun “to realize that what I needed was enough of the right things.”

I’m not sure if I’ve landed on the right or wrong things, but for now, they most certainly include a personal library of approximately 730 books, an antique writing desk I inherited from the previous tenant, an entire storage bin of old journals, dozens of pothos clippings, and all the other things that I may or may not actually need, but dammit, they’re mine, and they’re coming with me.

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What I’m Sorting Through, Currently …

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Revisiting a Story, & the Contents of my Closets

This entire process of moving has me at turns wildly sentimental followed by moments of calm decisiveness, like on Monday, when I found myself nearly weeping over my mother’s ISTA lapel pin collection moments before I dumped them all in a donation box.

I had conveniently forgotten that years ago, after I brought my mother’s entire jewelry collection back to Chicago, I didn’t want to deal with it, so I had shoved it in the back corner of my bedroom closet, only to be confronted with it again now. (This seems to be a habit of mine I hope to break in my new home. Remember my broken space heater? Of course you don’t. Neither did I.)

I’ve been wearing my mother’s rings for many years, and more recently, a pair of small gold hoops of hers are in heavy rotation. Did I need dozens of tiny pins, most of them in the shape of apples, to remember my mother’s devotion to her teaching career? Did I need the 90s jewelry that she would surely have gotten rid of many years ago herself? What was the point of it all, if I was only going to shove it back in a box, in the back of a closet?

I thought about this personal history essay Ann Patchett had written for The New Yorker in 2021, which I originally read just a month or so after spending a weekend with my father in his garage, cleaning out old cards and photos and paperwork of my mother’s, and his mother’s, too.

The timing was downright eerie. Here we were, sorting through every card my mother had apparently received from the age of approximately 35 until age 51, and here’s Patchett:

“This was the practice: I was starting to get rid of my possessions, at least the useless ones, because possessions stood between me and death. They didn’t protect me from death, but they created a barrier in my understanding, like layers of bubble wrap, so that instead of thinking about what was coming and the beauty that was here now I was thinking about the piles of shiny trinkets I’d accumulated. I had begun the journey of digging out.”

Back then, I ripped the story from the magazine and mailed it to Dad, a practice I usually reserve for the latest David Sedaris.

Another excerpt:

The closer I got to the places where I slept and worked, the more complicated my choices became. The sandwich-size ziplock of my grandmother’s costume jewelry nearly sank me, all those missing beads and broken clasps. I have no memory of her wearing any of it, but she liked to sort it now and then, and she let my sister and me play with it. Somehow the tangle of cheap necklaces and bracelets and vicious clip-on earrings had managed to follow her all the way to the dementia ward. I scooped it out of the nightstand in her room after she died, not because I wanted it but because I didn’t know how to leave it there.

In the end, I decided to let it go, because who in the world would understand its meaning once I was gone? I had my grandmother’s heart locket with pictures of my mother and my grandfather inside. I had the ring with the two ovals of green glass that her brother Roy gave her when she graduated from eighth grade. I had her wedding ring, thin as a thread, which I wore on my left hand now.

“… not because I wanted it but because I didn’t know how to leave it there.”

You really need to read it.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but it reminds me of a couple of weeks ago, when I gave my friend Eileen’s daughter Noelle a little gift from Paris that at the last minute, I decided to put inside a Typology toiletry bag rather than a gift bag. Earlier that day I’d discovered the rather frightening amount of toiletry bags I had in my possession, plus my storage bin with gift bags was now underneath a stack of other bins. The zipper was sticking, maybe broken, and so I almost talked myself out of it, thinking it was silly, maybe even tacky. But it was French! It was worth the risk.

I apologized about the zipper, feeling sheepish, as she opened it. Noelle, meanwhile, grinned at me like I’d gifted her an actual trip to Paris.

Like Patchett writes, “In any practice, there will be tests. That’s why we call it a practice—so we’ll be ready to meet our challenges when the time comes.”

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In Pursuit of … Whatever

Four more things that have my attention for at least the next four minutes:

• Embarking on a summer slow read of Middlemarch, to explain why it’s the only book I own that’s not currently in a box

• Still slow-reading Lonesome Dove! (You’re welcome that I’m not mentioning this as often as I did War & Peace?)

• Ready to immediately rewatch Forever, the perfect Netflix adaptation of the beloved Judy Blume story

• Considering if I should rewatch Station Eleven again this summer to restore my faith in humanity’s future after watching this excellent but bleak movie starring Jeevan, I mean Himesh Patel

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moodboard ~ late May

previously:

to be sorted later #25