There is always a sadness about packing. I guess you wonder if where you’re going is as good as where you’ve been.
― Richard Proenneke, One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey

Even as I write this post, I can hear my critic-voice accusing me of being too maudeline. Still, I must confess that I’m sad. Sadder than I’ve been for a long time. There’s no getting around it: packing up is sad business.

Yesterday, my family home became someone else’s home. When I close my eyes, I will always be able to walk the rooms and see where my mother placed all her treasures, most secondhand or inherited finds from family and friends. I can see my father’s racing pigeon trophies high on the book shelves in his den and the gallery of family photos that completely took over the upstairs hallway. I can see the bedroom where I slept under the eaves and the small galley kitchen where we once ate on stools, barely an inch of space between us. When you pack up a house, you also pack up the glorious and the painful moments that have lived companionably in that space. And I suppose that, as author Richard Proennecke writes, you wonder if where you’re going is a good as where you’ve been.

I recently learned of the death of a dear friend. Her unflagging optimism and quirky sense of humor sustained me throughout junior and senior high school. We shared secret jokes that insulated us from the sharp edges of the “popular girls.” We cooked up missions that sent us into unsuspecting yards to pose with the lawn ornaments there just as cars of college students passed. We shared an appreciation for the humor of Jerry Lewis and regularly greeted each other in the school hallways with “Come fly with me!” We got each other. And this was more than enough to make the slings and arrows of adolescence bearable. We pack up homes, but we also pack up lives, boxing up moments and images that we’ll carry with us. Today, I remember my friend and know that I’ll need a storage container for the friendship I’ve packed.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been really lousy at leaving places and people. While others may part in what appear to be graceful exits, mine are most often messy, slobbering affairs. I always had to circle the block several times when I left my parents’ home, hoping to get one last glimpse of them on the terrace. When I finished a school year, I always planned parting celebrations for my students, so that I could memorialize all we’d shared. As a young mother, when I drove out of town without my children, I felt the compulsion to formalize my goodbyes, just in case I died and never saw them again. Each time I drive into town, I still pass the Queen Anne house we left decades ago. It never occurs to me to take another route; it’s a ritual I must perform. Before I left my family home a week ago, I walked through each room and into each closet one last time, as I formally and tearfully let go. Then I packed up the life I’d lived there and drove away.

It comes as no surprise to me that I’m struggling with this season of packing up. As people I know and love die or move on, as familiar places change hands or are torn down, sadness seems inevitable. But it’s a particularly sweet sadness that comes with boxes of treasures, all waiting to be opened again–and again. It’s a sadness that overwhelms you with tears one moment and smiles the next. And it’s a sadness that reminds you that you have loved and been loved and that your storerooms are full.

Packing Up
--for my siblings

I’ve been trying to pack up all our treasures:

that bright space we leaped into,
our nightgowns like flannel sails in the evening air
as we jumped from bed to bed,
the wooden slats underneath trembling—once breaking—
and our father, cajoling and laughing,
urging us higher, but quietly or your mom will hear;

the moments after supper
when dark mounds of fudge cooled on wax paper
and us crowding the kitchen doorway, salivating
and asking Now, now?

the history of us around the big table,
warming our lives over casserole and pie,
each of us refusing to be the first to leave,
all of us tethering ourselves to the wooden chairs
which numbed our butts beyond reason.

All these things I’ve tried to pack,
knowing that soon I’ll shut the door 
on our family home one last time,
fearing that I may not remember the magic of my closet,
the sweet hours there with dolls and books and plastic horses,
fearing that I won’t hear the gray cat purring on our mother’s lap
or the low cries of mourning doves from the eaves,
fearing that I may not be able to close my eyes
and see the walls papered with our father’s words.

Yet even now as I close the door,
there is the soft hum of the black Singer from the basement
and our mother’s able hands
stitching these remnants into a family.