"Walking we are caught"

*written yesterday*

Packing is such a strange undertaking.

 

Something like twenty years ago, I think shortly after I had to bite my then-boyfriend to get him wake enough to move so I could climb out of our twin bed to go to the bathroom, I decided to invest in a queen mattress.  It was the second biggest ticket item I'd ever bought, half as much my car cost (this speaks to the cheapness of Dolores, not the expense of the mattress), and it scared me so much, the first thing that didn't feel like it could either fit in my car or be easily abandoned.  I cried about it for days.  It felt like an object that transitioned me from intangible to tangible, free to frangible.   

 

Later, I'd realize nothing can't be abandoned, I was always frangible, always tangible.  But at the time it was important and hard and a lesson I completely failed to learn.  I think we still have that mattress, but it's been long enough that I'm not sure, mattress buying isn't an occasion, I'm a person who lives well above the poverty level, a person who has stuff.  And there's the flip side, my books, which I've been collecting forever, which feel like the emotional equivalent of falling asleep under a weighted blanket, something keeping me from unraveling, from floating off.   The collection has been refined, but the number trends ever upward.

 

I feel all at once like I'm weeding too much and not enough, throwing away the wrong things, keeping the wrong things, focusing on the wrong things that I need to acquire to fit into this new house.

 

Talked to Media tonight, he's got a gap in childcare between old nanny and new nanny that he was hoping I could help fill, and I discovered that he was actually quite concerned that this buying a house from my other brother was going to go disastrously in some family-fracturing way.  And we do come from people inclined to hold grudges, stop speaking to each other for decades, but this thing with Mech and Teach and us has been so easy and I think that we've jumped almost all if not all of the hurdles. We've closed on their-now-our house and they've closed on their new house.   (which has a pool, a fact I find both incredibly appealing and a little alarming, like I need to find a class to take in how to recognize instinctive drowning behavior or something, even though I'm not actually a very good swimmer.   I'm still a pretty good not-drowner, but that's different)   

  

*medium-length bit about missing snorkeling, and missing Hands and Hips and some of the things life might look like on the other side of this removed*

Eight days until I get to touch a beluga whale.  (I was wrong, I don't get to hug them, just interact)