Nine years ago, I graduated college, worked a summer job in my college town for half the summer while simultaneously preparing to uproot my life and move to Germany for a one-year (ha!) grant program, then gave myself something like a week total to pack up everything I owned, empty out the apartment where I'd lived for the whole second half of college, somehow (the mind still boggles) fit it all inside my parents' car in one go and drive it back across from Ohio to New York with AWESOME parental assistance, pack it all into storage at my parents' house, then also pack for a trip that not only included moving to Germany for a year but also visiting Hawaii and Thailand, uh, "on the way" there (yes, I know my definition of "on the way" is flexible). I shipped one box to Germany, but other than that arrived there with only what fit in my travel backpack. Everything else I'd previously owned stayed in boxes in my parents' house.
And has stayed there, unopened, ever since.
Tomorrow I move into a place of my own in the US for the first time in nine years, a summer sublet with a friend. So all day today I've been digging through my old, stored stuff, finding things I didn't even remember I owned. Hello entire set of pots and pans and kitchenware! Hello bedsheets I bought as a freshman going off to college, blue and spangled with moons and stars. Hello lovely old chest in which my college housemate and I stored kahlúa and all our other fun drink mixers for parties, which is apparently something that college friends still remember about me and I'd forgotten: my house was always the place with the fun and creative drinks. (I pause here to frown in Germany's general direction, for getting me accustomed to nothing but beer, beer and more beer.) Hello table made from an old orange crate. Hello lovely Thai fabrics waiting all these years to be draped over things.
Y'all and I are going to have some fun this summer.
No comments:
Post a Comment