Containers of dreams

Remember these pictures? On December 4, almost three months ago, we closed the door on an ugly red container and watched it drive off, lumbering and huge, through crowded city streets. Other than the eight suitcases we had piled into our station wagon (first loading the kids into my mother’s car), everything we owned was shut into that container, boxed and bubblewrapped and sealed. We can hardly remember even what was in there.

The wretched moving company, whose name we curse, told us we’d be unwrapping the bubble wrap on January 29, and there was even a week when we believed that the container was sitting on the wharf, waiting to be cleared through customs. Really, as it turned out, it was sitting on a wharf in Singapore, waiting to be transferred to a ship that might take it in our general direction. Now another month has passed, and today we got the news that our things have actually arrived and have cleared customs and are waiting to be checked through the quarantine folks (the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry -- MAF). It turns out that that big red container has been brought to the moving company’s warehouse, where it will be totally unpacked and inspected by MAF (there’s a manifest so that MAF will know which boxes to open) and then repacked. And then DELIVERED to us. Somewhere about next Tuesday—one week from today.

I’m trying to make sense of how I feel about all of this. On the one hand, this is utterly exciting. Ah, how glorious to see our own things here, to have clothes to wear, dressers to put clothes in, rugs on the floors. We can see what this house really looks like once our things are in it. There are precious things I’ve been missing: the chiming clock we gave one another as a wedding present, the few pieces of my grandmother’s silver, our photo albums. There are also practical things I’ve been missing: our pots and pans, books and bookshelves, and oh, most of all, my kitchen aid.

AND it’s an awful lot of work to unpack things, to put things away. There are hours of unpacking and unwrapping dishes and trinkets, and finding places for them in the few cupboards and closets. And there is the work we didn’t do in the packing frenzy—decide which things won’t find places in this much smaller house, which things will never find a home here in cupboards or closets and need to be given away. The other work is a mindset issue: we’ve now left the settling-in rhythm. It doesn’t feel like we’ve just arrived; it feels like we live here. We see people we know on the beach, have friends over for dinner, know what is around the next bend on the train ride to town. We’re relatively settled here after three months, or at least more settled than I might have imagined. It somehow feels like the fuel I need to power the unpacking was used up in the nervous energy of the first several weeks here. Now my sights are set on thinking about my work at NZCER, writing the book, playing with the kids. How will I find the time and energy to slog through this next part?

But of course it's not really the physical effort of the work that gives me pause; it's the emotional effort. The prospect of the unpacking somehow connects me with other moments in time. It’s a direct line to the other transition points in my life, and I feel them crowding around me as I think about setting to work. I remember Aidan as a little baby pulling newspaper out of boxes at Belmont Road, I remember working not to be claustrophobic as I traded in the big back yard of Augusta for the tiny back porch in Cambridge, I remember wedging the bed into the minuscule bedroom of our first apartment in the year we were married. And it connects me into the future, to the unknown next time when I’ll find myself unpacking again. Will we next unpack at Barbara’s house on the hill? In some other country? In Bethesda? I feel the forwards and backwards tugs of time and feel all the unknowns swirling around me. Who knew I packed all those emotions in bubblewrap and sent them across the sea. Wonder whether they’ll make it through quarantine.