My Life in Boxes

The last time my library of books sat on actual bookshelves was in July of 2010. That’s when I packed them away. I’ve not seen them since. Within a couple more months that year, I’d filled our old garage with cardboard boxes of DVDs and photos, of decorations and glassware. Anything that might distract or annoy a prospective homeowner who might want to purchase our house in Michigan went into boxes and into the ever-increasing stacks where the cars used to sit.

Over the course of 2010 and 2011, while Craig was living in Connecticut and I was living in Michigan and trying to keep our house on the market, those cardboard boxes in the garage multiplied month by month. I packed everything that wasn’t essential. Extra blankets and linens. Winter clothing, which I promptly had to unpack and replace with spring clothing as the weather got colder. Winter clothing again, when I had to dig out the warm weather stuff after the months became almost a year. I packed kitchen goods and cat toys, board games and wrapping paper, old treasures and things we’d just purchased. My weekly routine was to hit Home Depot, buy a crapload of cheap cardboard boxes, and then fill them with vacuum bags and clocks and candles and towels and Silpats and spoons and paper reams and extension cords and CDs and the gifts people had given us for Christmas and anniversaries that we never used but with which couldn’t bear to part.

If I wasn’t throwing away stuff—and I threw away a dumpster’s worth of crap we were well rid of, and another dumpster’s worth of stuff that I kind of wish I hadn’t—I packed it into a box, taped it up, and put it in the garage. When we’d moved to that house a little over a decade before, I’d started off with great enthusiasm creating boxes with very clear labels so thoroughly packed with information that they resembled the nutritional data on supermarket goods. (CHRISTMAS ANNUAL COOKBOOKS 1992-2002: 11 LBS. ALUMINUM FOIL/WAX PAPER/PARCHMENT PAPER/FOIL SQUARES/PLASTIC WRAP: 20% BY WEIGHT.)

My organizational zest dimmed very quickly, however, so that after I’d written the equivalent of a master’s thesis on the first few dozen boxes I packed, I was sick enough of the job that I would simply toss into a single carton an old afghan, a half-used bottle of soap bubbles, two winter hats, a weird plastic thing that had been sitting on the kitchen sill for two years because it had dropped off something and we didn’t know what yet we were afraid to throw it away, a broken umbrella, a waste basket, and a tangled skein of old Christmas tree lights and slap on the outside a label that read SEASONAL MISC.

Mystery Boxes, we ended up calling them when we got to the new house. We still had several of them, intact and as undisturbed as Tutankhamen’s tomb, in the crawl space of the house when we started the move to Connecticut. Ten years after they’d been packed, I threw out most of their contents.

I didn’t want any Mystery Boxes on this move. When I put my thousands of books into storage, I’d labeled them by subject matter if I could. If I couldn’t, I’d at least mark from what bookcase and which room they’d come. We’d digitized all our CDs years ago, but I spent three days alphabetizing them and putting the jewel cases into boxes with legends like VANCE’S CDS: BA-CL—just in case we had to find something specific, at some point. If I had to pack my family’s nineteenth-century linens in with a lampshade and a pack of tarot cards, instead of simply slapping the ASST. MISC label on it, I’d write out the crap that was inside. I was thorough, dammit.

Since we were being professionally moved, however, we let the movers do the bulk of the remaining job, the two days before the van left. What they packed tended to be those things I’d deemed necessary until the last minute. If anything, though, the movers tended to lean to my former organizational method. When we arrived in our new neighborhood, we had a dozen boxes marked KITCHEN, but no idea in which the plates or cutlery might be found. Items that we expected to be found in BASEMENT FRONT appeared in UPSTAIRS HALL CLOSET. There are several containers marked LIVING ROOM, but whether they contain books, or pillows, or area rugs, or all three, is a bit of a mystery. Though we rescued my favorite of the stained glass lampshades from its enclosure, intending to use it in our temporary living room, we never did find the base in any of the boxes marked LAMPSHADES/LAMPSTANDS, nor in any of those LIVING ROOM boxes. (I fully expect to find it eventually in SOFT FURNISHINGS/SPARE BEDROOM.)

The movers were extremely thorough in protecting every object with reams and reams of paper, however. I will give them credit for that. I remember well the entire afternoon and evening it took to excavate my kitchen spices from a strata in the middle of a four-and-a-half-foot-high KITCHEN box. It was such a lengthy task because the movers had mummified each spice in two—two!—sheets of of manila wrapping paper roughly a yard square each. Seriously. At first I’d thought I’d hit on a layer of wadded-up paper, and started to throw it all out. Then I realized that if I unscrewed each ball, rolled it out first lengthwise then widthwise, and dug around in the protective kernel within, I’d find a solitary shaker of adobo seasoning, or a teeny-tiny plastic container of cloves. I’m actually dreading the day—soon—when we finally move into our more permanent home and I dive once more into that Mystery Box and discover an ossified container of honey or an equally-petrified Pop-Tart. In their own individual bulky wrappings, of course.

The home that we were promised as part of the job package is finally (finally!) nearing its renovation, meaning we should be able to start moving those boxes once again to their final destination. Save for what we fished out for the kitchen, and save for the clothing we’ve been wearing the last nearly three years, everything we own is still in those boxes. It was impossible to fit the contents of a three-bedroom Colonial in the eight hundred square feet of the one-floor flat we’ve been calling ‘temporary’ since 2011. I haven’t seen their contents for nearly four years at this point.

And you know, for the longest time I actually was able to keep in my head a catalog of what was there. I knew exactly what we’d deemed essential for day-to-day temporary living (potato masher, perpetual calendar, butane lighter) and what still lurked in those hundreds of cartons in storage (cheese grater, glass vases, old journals). If I’d packed the box myself, I knew exactly what was in them; when Craig needed a particular computer dongle, I’d produce it almost instantly from the correct carton in storage, where I’d wedged it inside a coffee mug, several Post-Its, and a cache of pens and paper clips (which had all sat on my home office desk together, thank you very much). For months and months I could perform that kind of miracle conjuring act.

Then—I don’t know when—all that information and muscle memory suddenly all vanished. Maybe I reached a point at which I no longer needed to remember where I’d possibly packed that box of envelopes. Maybe our computer situation became so streamlined that my brain no longer felt the need to keep a complete catalog of the ethernet cords we’d used at our old house. Maybe my brain was so overloaded that it could no longer keep track of Craig’s bowling ball. Whatever the cause, it just all vanished. Now, every box is a Mystery Box again.

The day rapidly approaches when we’ll be moving two doors down and expanding back into a three-bedroom home again. I’m finding myself baffled and a little overwhelmed by the vague memories of belongings that remain. We did used to have a large soup pot, didn’t we? Or is it one of the things we threw out? How about an olive tray? If we had one, why? Did I ever have any rain boots? That stained glass rose lampshade did have a base—didn’t it? What the hell is in those boxes that we haven’t found essential for four years, now?

We keep telling ourselves it’ll be like Christmas when we finally unpack. We toss off that little witticism and laugh lightly about it. But I have a sense of faint unease, even as I joke about it now. Our household is a pared-down version of itself compared to 2010, it’s true—but how it is we’ve managed to do without so many of our things for so long?

I picture us unsheathing each item, one by one, regarding them with puzzlement. They’ll be like quaint museum pieces. Perhaps they’ll have a recognizable function, but no relevance to the mess of debris and gadgets around which we now organize our life than a tin washing board, or a funerary relic. I worry that each object will carry the ache of familiarity, perhaps, but nothing approaching necessity.