I Hate Moving, and Now We Have To
This tumbleweed has picked up a lot of detritus in seven years
When I moved to Italy seven years ago, I brought two suitcases, and that’s it.
Hindsight being 20/20, I might have spared myself the bother of at least one of those suitcases. The clothes I wore in Texas (high heels, fancy dresses, athletic wear) have no place in Italy. One walk across the cobblestones in a pair of heels, and it’s a trip to the ER with you.
Unless you’re Italian, of course. I’ve seen Italian women in stilettos navigating medieval cobblestones streets, and they don’t even look down. It’s insane.
I’ve always traveled light. A person might argue that my ability to do so bears some relationship to my unwillingness to commit even to furniture and personal effects, and that person wouldn’t be wrong. Before moving to Italy, I suffered no qualms selling off all my furniture and donating most of my clothes. Books, I would never sell. Books are friends—friends I miss, by the way. I get panicky without them.
But I’ve picked up quite a few other books over these seven years, which is shocking when you consider how few books in English are to be found in Italy. Books are awful things to relocate. They’re heavy. They take up a lot of room and require some kind of containment apparatus, which is also heavy. Yet even that pales in comparison to my boyfriend John’s collection of vintage vinyls. He has over a thousand, also in bookshelves.
John has exquisite taste in furniture and light fixtures. His ancestral portraits date back to the 1700s. John does not travel light, which fills me with terror since we’re moving from one medieval town to another. Italy was never designed to accommodate moves. Historically, no one moved. We have two flights of unevenly spaced stairs going down, and three flights of stairs going up, not to mention the narrow streets with gaping holes in them. That leaves a Grand Canyon-sized margin for error. I try not to think about the million ways this move in two weeks can go wrong.
But I think my dread goes deeper than that. I’m seven years older now. I’ve nested. All these lockdowns have driven me deeper into myself, and at my age, I don’t mind the company there. She’s not a bad old broad. A bit tattered and disillusioned, perhaps, but more of a softie than she likes to admit. Tons of empathy, involuntary though some of that empathy may be.
So now I’m facing a startling truth, one I never saw coming: I’m getting set in my ways. I’m not the footloose filly I was seven years ago. I need the comfortable familiarity of my chair, my coffee cup, my back pillow. I might have, gasp, put down roots. And as any gardener will tell you, extirpating a root system requires real muscle. I’m not 100% sure my muscles are quite up to the task.
We are moving to my beloved Umbria, though, which is where I set THE GROWING SEASON, my novel that I have on submission. I adore Umbria, and I am wildly charmed by Amelia, the borgo we’re moving to, the oldest in Umbria, possibly older than Rome itself. I predict a grand adventure. And our new apartment, even though it’s three flights up, has ceiling frescoes from the 18th century. So that’s no loss.
All this to say: change gets harder as we get older. It’s one of the many galling realities we don’t know we’re facing until we get there. In the interests of fairness, it may be that pandemic lockdowns contributed mightily to the atrophy of my psychological flexibility, but I don’t think I’m wrong about this.
So, what does this mean for you?
If you have a yen to travel, do it now. Don’t put it off till retirement. Get your passport, PACK LIGHT, and hit the road. You might not enjoy it as much when you’re older. You may let the snares of comfort and ease get the better of your pioneering spirit.
Carpe diem, baby.
How are you different now than you were seven years ago? Comment below!
I moved back home after galavanting around the Seattle area and Alaska for work, getting married, having kids, and divorcing. Being home again has been very healing and I'm here also to take care of my aging parents. I've been back for 13 years. I am quite settled yet... if I stay here the rest of my life, which looks like a distinct economic possibility since I will be willed this place, I will never ever live somewhere with frescoes on the ceiling, unless I create them myself. Which would be such sloppy seconds in comparison. I think the quiet life you are living, even with all the bureaucracy weirdness, and language difficulties seems so safe and cozy. The US is nowhere near healed from the rising fascism so every modicum of peace I feel is daily disrupted by the dread of what is next. Your troubles of moving your collected histories amongst a bigger history in a time of relative peace for Italy actually calms me. There will be peace after violent chaos but there will also be weirdness and magic.
"John’s collection of vintage vinyls. He has over a thousand" -- <emoji for jaw dropping here.>
One of the things that new academics experience is their time as "academic tinkers." The first jobs you get are typically 1-year replacement positions ("1yrp" -- somebody is going on sabbatical) and so you spend the first few years moving EVERY year. When I came down to Carbondale to begin my Ph.D. I brought EVERYTHING with me. But when I left for my first 1yrp, I "only" carried 10 boxes of books with me (the rest went into storage.) At the end of my 3rd 1yrp, I needed to drop everything and deal with my dad's dementia and long term care. At that point, I cut down to just 5 boxes. After 2 yrs of that, I returned to So IL, to take up space behind my friends' Pat & Toni's pole barn, which came to house all the boxes I'd left behind.
But here's the thing: I had to move into a 30' X 8' travel trailer. So even those last 5 boxes of books went into storage. But back in 2009, a few months after I'd moved to AZ to deal with my dad, Pat & Toni bought me a Kindle (DX) for Christmas.
I still have that Kindle, 12 yo tech that it is. Along with my coauthor, I wrote "The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead's Radical Empiricism" with that as my operational library. We even had to invent an entirely new method of citation, because a few of the books we were working from were mine and only existed on said Kindle. (The book is highly regarded in the circle of Whitehead scholarship.) A shoestring calculation indicates that I have more books on it than in the 55 boxes stored in my friends' pole barn.
Necessity is a Mother, but it brooks no compromise with sentiment. Beyond me kitties, I feel no attachment to anything I can't carry in my hands or sling over my shoulders. I'd be sad to leave my DVD's and Blu-rays behind, but with streaming services I could do so and never look back. (My music and library are both backed up on multiple flash drives, all of which can fit in a pocket.)
On the other hand, I certainly don't envy you your move. After I landed in AZ to deal with my dad, I'd be driving down the road and suddenly feel sick to my stomach. I realized the cause: I was living between a U-Haul and Budget rental places, and seeing their trucks on the road triggered my stress. Once understood, I was able to "pull the pins" from the problem, and it ceased to bother me. But I do get it. On the stress scale, moving is right behind divorce and death of a loved one.