I like to think I am a professional Mover.
If moving could be my second job I would be rich by now.
Since the age of 18 I have not lived in the same place for more than a year.
I have moved from dorm to dorm, state to state, and country to country.
From Gaines to 62 Park Street to the new dorm at St. Lawrence University.
From the United States to India.
From New Delhi to Jaipur to Mussoorie to Shimla.
From Canton to Saranac Lake to Lake Placid.
From Lake Placid to Miami to Marathon.
From Marathon to Novi to Mount Clemens.
From New York to Florida to Michigan.
I have lived through numerous zip codes and multiple area codes.
I’ve changed my address more times than my mother can keep up.
I remember them all though. Keeping a list in the back of my address book.
It all starts with college. This iconic image of moving out of my childhood room with stuffed totes of pictures and frivolous decorations and army bags full of clothes. My mother’s van is packed to the brim the day I leave for college. It is a straight downpour of August rain. I remember making multiple wet trips in and out of my dorm with my father, my mother staying dry inside, making my bed and trying to organize my out of control and messy life. This is the first and last time my parents will ever help me move. I think the rain really got to them.
Through college I move myself in and out of four different dorm rooms. I haul my life, up and down two to three flights of stairs, in and out of rain storms and below freezing temperatures.
I always think I overpack, but once I’m settled and moved in I’m thankful for all that I bring. Including that dirty Jenga game or pair of ice skates I considered leaving behind. While unpacking, after everything is unloaded from my car, I open a beer and drink it slow as I set up yet another room, making it a little different from the one I had before.
The fall semester of my senior year of college I move to and study abroad in India. Opposed to a car full of my belongings, I can only take my sister’s REI camping pack and my L.L. Bean school backpack. These two backpacks contain what I will need for four months. I go a little insane in the days before I leave, thinking I’m not taking enough. What if I need another jacket? What if that pair of sandals break? Will six pairs of underwear be enough? Should I pack a thong? Returning home, to a bedroom full of things I never once used while in India, I feel overwhelmed. I declutter my room and fill bags of clothes to donate to the Salvation Army.
I lied. My parents do help me move out of my last college dorm room. The one I did not pack up enough of by myself before Graduation. Even when I had a full week to pack but was too busy getting married and partying every night to even think about it. After the commencement and a nauseas hangover, my father tries to help me pack up my mess of a room. Girlfriends I will never see again, and the love of my life who is moving to Australia, try to have heartfelt goodbyes with me, but I am too busy trying to finish packing within the hour time limit my father gives me because he has to work tomorrow morning. After nearly being pushed out of my last and favorite dorm room, I cry the entire three hours home. Never getting a chance to properly say goodbye to the room. I still have dreams about it.
A week after Graduation I move up to the Adirondacks of New York. First, I move into a beautiful yellow house with four close friends in Saranac Lake. We throw raging parties, tan naked on the back deck, and my bedroom window has a clear view of Whiteface Mountain. Half way through the summer our water goes bad and we can’t wash our hands or take showers anymore due to the toxic stench. I partly move in with my boyfriend in town and after our three-month lease is up, I reserve a U-Haul to help move me and my girlfriends out. My childhood friend, Ivy, and I move in to this little brown house of the bartender we work with in Lake Placid. I take the bigger room with five tall windows. The first time it snows I feel like I’m in a snow globe. Ivy and I move out in December, a few days before Christmas, and decide we are heading to Florida. We needed to get away.
Ivy knows where she is going to live in Florida. I, on the other hand have no idea. My best friend, Savannah, and I load up the back of her Ford Ranger with camping gear and living materials to get us by until we find a place to live. If we find one that is. We road trip from New York to Florida, stopping and staying with friends in each state with pass through. After camping along a beach in Miami for a few days at a music festival, we decide to keep driving down to the Keys. On the night of my 23rd birthday, at a bar I receive free shots from, the bartender mentions a studio apartment for rent near where she lives. Within days we move in and sleep on an air mattress for two months. Savannah moves out three months later and my new boyfriend moves in two months after that. We buy used, cheap furniture and an old white television from the 90’s. The apartment borders an RV park and one crazy neighbor who yells at us for watching Red Box movies too loud. The landlord is crazy. She never gives us our security deposit back due to forgetting to clean the fan blades when we leave. If only I could tell the future tenants what they are getting into.
My boyfriend and I tightly pack the bed of his Dodge Ram, throwing a blue tarp over the back and ratchet strapping our Florida belongings down. The cat rides with him and my car is enclosed with laundry baskets of clothes, boxes of books, and easy to access beach supplies for the multiple beaches we will stop at on our drive North. We take a two-week long vacation, staying with long lost relatives in the back woods of Georgia or at cheap hotels where we can be as rowdy as we want. We eventually make it to Michigan with no apartment or house lined up. His sister allows us to stay her until we figure things out. At this point I am sick of moving and not having my own space or house. I drive to New York to reclaim the other half of my life and return to the bedroom I had since childhood. I spend the summer at my parent’s house and realize I haven’t lived at home this long since I was in high school. I feel like I grew down a few years.
There is an art to moving. A flow.
The more places you live, the more places you know, the more places you know how to move to next.
Each time you learn something different. Like not to move in winter or when you don’t have a place to move to, preferably. Each time you emerge a little bit older, a little bit wiser and more knowledgeable on the practice of moving.
So that by the next time you move, it will be the easiest move of them all.
You keep telling yourself that anyway.
After four months of being displaced and technically homeless, I finally have an address again.
A few days ago, in the pouring August rain, my boyfriend and I move into an old yellow house.
It has a clawfoot tub, oak floors, and a back deck that overlooks a large backyard and two red sheds. It has a Michigan basement that smells of mothballs and gives you the heebie-jeebies every time you go down to do your laundry
It is my dream house. The one I imagined having as a child and drew pictures of in preschool. The house that has a tiny room upstairs with a large closet where you can hang all of the clothes that have followed you around for the past six years.
The room you can hang pink prayer flags from, burn lavender incense in, and litter the walls with all the pictures of the places you’ve been and people you love.
The room you can put a desk in.
The desk you will write this from.
75 Gallup Street, Mount Clemens, Michigan, 48043.
Write me, find me, stop by for a visit.
I think it’s time I stay in one place for a while.
Love it!