Digging Deeper

This past month has been exhausting.  Several co-workers are away and covering their workload has been stressful in both volume and  in the rather steep learning curve required to bumble my way around someone else's area of expertise.  I came back from a week off for poly camping to a mountain that overwhelmed my inbox.  I took me about two weeks to catch up and I'm not sure I really did.  It was very much like climbing up the down escalator.  Everyone will be back on Monday and I think we will be all caught up by then.

Additionally, I had an unexpected move thrown into the works.  We knew that the owners of the house we were renting had plans to tear it down and build something new and shiny but we didn't know until July that it would be so soon.  We were given notice to be out by the end of September.  This being a town of several colleges and universities, August & September are not the time to be looking for housing.  Amazingly we found a wonderful rental home with an excellent view in a very nice neighbourhood for a rent well under my maximum budget amount.  BUT we had to take it August first and haul our fannies to get out by Aug 31.  Now, I had been culling our vast stash of packrat just in case goodies.  (You never know when you might need that assuming you could ever find it in the back of some closet stuff.)  And I really thought I had done very well with it.  Until I began to pack up the house.  We had a junk it , donate it, recycle it and move it pile in various areas of the house.  The donate it pile and recycle it pile were shipped out regularly.  Then the donation place said ....no! no! no more!  Friends shut their drapes and pretended not to be home when we pulled up with stuff to share.  The next door neighbour who runs a salvage business from his home checked on our discard pile in the driveway regularly gauging the income in his future and rubbing his hands with glee.  As the pile grew and the other neighbours whispered amongst themselves pondering what kind of cavernous storage space we had to have housed all this or was it breeding in the sunlight and would it not soon take over the street.  We dragged stuff out, we sorted, we packed , we moaned.  It was endless.  Every night after work we'd go to the old house and work.  Then take a load home in a borrowed stationwagon.  On weekends we worked full days.  It was as if someone was moving stuff in at night and replenishing the stuff we still had in the house.  I thought I heard the stuff talking about us and laughing at one point but maybe it was just the neighbours.

Finally, we dug up my holly trees and rosebushes and waved goodbye to the old house.  The neighbour with the salvage business would clear the small mountain in the driveway in a day or so.  Now I come home every night and either unpack boxes or , as I'm doing tonight, practice work avoidance and play on the computer.  I have time, I think.  The stuff is sneaky though and it smuggles the things I'm looking for into other boxes although I'm sure I put it in the box with this other thing.  I will have to empty all the boxes and organize the stuff so it knows who the boss is or rather forgets who the boss is and becomes convinced that I am the boss of it.


As I sorted through the stuff, I wondered at the wisdom of apparently buying multiple versions of the same items to replace ones that have gone astray.  They find each other and hide in the basement.  I also marveled at the bits of my life that I found.  Cassette tapes, letters, photos, stuffed toys and tourist trap items that were memory tweaks of some of the loves of my life.  Somethings I kept were very sweet and loving.  Others like the cassette tape with a notation "death threat - keep this" not so much.  It occurred to me that it was definitely time to purge myself of several of these items and the associated memories.   It also occurred to me that I'm an emotional packrat too.  I keep those memories and replay them over and over.  Enjoying the good ones and punishing myself with the bad ones.  I wonder if any of these lost loves would even think of me never mind stew about some events that happened years ago.   I like to be omnipotent and entirely responsible for how things go when they go wrong and yet am sure of (and unnerved by) my crazy luck when they go right.  As I sorted through the crap in my basement and the crap in my heart, I realized that for once I was at a place where I was jointly responsible for the good and difficult in my every moment.  I was in a loving relationship with two other people who were as invested in it as I was and working on our own issues while supported by the others.  Holy Nirvana, Batboys and Batgirls!!   Yeah...it was definitely time to clean house and start afresh, together, on a wonderful path to intentional community.