Moving

We are in the process of moving house. The large items--furniture, vacuum cleaners--have been taken care of and now it comes down to the little, revelatory things. The things I was unaware I owned. I find myself walking down a public sidewalk holding a dirty sponge mop, a stack of CDs, a print of Ansel Adams' cactus and a single infant-sized sock that has somehow wandered off from the herd and I wonder how it happens. How do I come into possession of all of these useless things? Why, once I have them, are they impossible to escape?

I mop--on the rare occasion that I mop--with a towel and a bucket of soapy water. The sponge-headed fellow spends all its time lurking in the closet, like a mildewed plague-carrier. I don't own a CD player. I think the Xbox might be able to play them, but I don't care to find out because my phone plays MP3s. Though I respect his efforts to further photography as an artform, I've never really liked Ansel Adams. It's a picture of a cactus, people. Babies can't walk, they don't wear shoes and there has never been a sock invented that will stay on those tiny feet anyway. Yet all of these things, and hundreds of similarly useless objects, have followed me from one abode to the next.

More though, stuff simply expands to fill all available space. I once owned a ten-car garage. It was a 1,800 square foot hanger. Empty, it had an echo and, like, interior weather patterns.

We managed to stuff it completely. Nine leaky garden hoses. Traffic cones. An full-sized anatomy skeleton. Four motorcycles, none running. A dozen Jeep doors, most of them left side doors. Dead plants, paint cans, bottle rockets in a plastic sack. A Taco Bell trashcan. We needed none of it, and yet we had it.

Now we live in a much smaller place. We don't even have a garage; the yard is about the size of a picnic blanket. Yet even after purging and downsizing, we still possess so much stuff that it took almost a week to move it all ten blocks north.

Someday I will move into a yurt--a condo of a yurt, a studio apartment of a yurt--that doesn't have space for all that stuff and I will be able to list every single thing I own. I will name every object in my yurt. I will talk to those objects. Remember, Pr0ny the Laptop, when we used to be burdened by possessions? Remember, Sitty the Chair, how we found that entire bag of Valentines Day-themed stuffed animals and couldn't even remember where they came from? Much better, Eaty the Plate, now that we're out here on the steppes. Much better, Shavy the razor. Much better.