Sore

Sunday night now, and we're back from a walk up the beach to meet Trish and Keith's new butterball of a puppy, who had the children moaning in delight. I'm sitting in the study, the desk cleared off just enough for this little laptop, papers and knick-knacks on every surface, boxes pushing close at the back of my chair. Things are, believe it or not, vastly improved.

Michael and I have been working all weekend to unpack, to put away, to return furniture to the lovely people who leant it to us in the first place. We tumble into our beautiful new bed after midnight each night, sore and exhausted, and we fall asleep either pondering the ache of muscles we didn't know we had or fretting over the mountains of work yet to come. But then we wake up in the morning, walk the dog along the early morning beach, and feel like everything is possible after all.

We're about 80% unpacked, I think, with most of the unpacked stuff put away and a skim coat of homeless items cluttering every surface. Normally neat Naomi's room is in the worst shape by far, but then she's had the most fun this weekend--a sleepover and then a playdate and then to the beach with a friend on Saturday, and then horseback riding all day today. No wonder her room looks so terrible.

While Michael and our spectacular friend P returned all the furniture today (in part because he's a Brit and drives on the right side of the road and thus is less nervous about the truck) and Naomi combed manes, Aidan and I stayed and unpacked all day at home. We worked in Aidan’s room a long time, me doing what he called “helping him,” which basically meant I did the putting-things-away part, and he did the playing-with-toys-he-hasn’t-seen-in-three-months part. I knew that this might make me really grumpy (why am I doing all the work in that room, too, when I also do all the work in the rest of the house), but I loved it. I had a perch from which to observe Aidan in his thinking and playing; I could hear him interact with the action figures, narrate the lego structure he was inventing. And from time to time, I would try to show him about organization (“So every time you’re done with playing with the ball, it goes in this bin marked ‘sports.’”) and he would get thrilled about it and start piling things in bins and then decide that these two action figures couldn’t be so close to each other in the bin because they were enemies and they needed some friends to be with them and where were those friends or maybe they should just try being on this boat—and then he was off again, playing while I worked.

It is mostly a joy to see our things. As the minimal furniture and kitchen equipment moved out and the hundreds of boxes moved in, I became excruciatingly aware of how much stuff we have accumulated. I think of us as people who aren’t that acquisitive, but my sore shoulders and back will tell you otherwise. And each of these precious things holds a memory or helps bake a cake or is so soft and cuddly to wear. It’s horrifying that I have so much, and, in some ways, lovely to have it.

The pictures today are of the house in various states of disarray. And, if you need soothing the way we need soothing after looking at so much chaos, there's a dawn picture of Perry on the beach this morning. And tonight, walking back from cuddling the astonishingly-glorious new puppy, we walked hand in hand down the star-lit beach, four of us looking at the sky, each of us interacting with it in our own way. Aidan wanted to know what would happen if you poured a glass of water on a star (would it go out? what if it were in a really big glass and was ice cold?), Naomi trying to grasp the concept of a light year, and me just holding their hands and basking in the wonder of it all: me, on a perfect starry night on a beach in New Zealand.