Nostalgia

Rose-colored Glasses - post by Jessica

This is a time of transition in our lives, which always, always makes me nostalgic. The entire period from when we start dismantling a place I have lived until the time I am settled into the new place, I have the angels and demons of every period of my life floating around my shoulders. I think of unhappy conversations that I haven’t thought about in years, or fantastic events that defined my life somehow. Granted, this process is facilitated by the fact that moving involves picking up the physical pieces of our lives, sorting through them, sometimes evaluating whether they are worthy to be kept, and then putting them into a box. Still, I feel like this time is worse. I have some theories as to why.

First, R and I decided that we really, really needed to go through all of our stuff and organize before we moved. Because of last year’s craziness, we barely sorted anything before it got dumped into boxes to be moved downstate. Our move up to Chicago was also very harried – and we were moving in together for the first time, so we were too busy dealing with multiple utensils and furniture items to worry about the boxes of papers and trinkets that we had collected. Now, our lives from 2006 until now are being spread across the living room, sorted into piles, then recycled or filed. And, I decided to go through our card collections – both my mom and my adoptive grandmother send cards for many holidays, especially Valentine’s Day.  So, I’m spending a lot of time in memory lane, even as we are starting to finally implement our plans for the year ahead.

In just about a week, I have my last day of work at Hillel. While I’m hoping to write about what I’ve learned here and some of my experiences, everything still feels way too close to even think about yet. I am still going to work every day, so it doesn’t feel as though much has changed since the middle of May when all the students left. And we’re still making decisions – trying to hire my replacement, hiring an Office Manager – the business here is still getting done. And yet, on July 1, that all ends, and on July 6 we fly to New York to find an apartment, and then head on vacation for a little bit. At the end of July, we’ll pack our lives up again and road-trip out to New York – and then, September 6, shortly after our fourth wedding anniversary, we’ll both start graduate school.

It’s daunting, and all the more so because I feel as though things are more vibrant this year. Maybe because I’ve been surrounded by student for a year, I’m more excited to be back as a student myself. It was such a risk to come here – whether we would be able to handle the absolute shower of problems here and then whether I would be able to get back into school. We dealt with as many of the problems as we could and we leave this place better than we found it. And I definitely got back into school! Still, now we face another huge life change – and I’m glad that we have made it to this time, place and season.

I’ll be sure to keep everyone updated – especially as things keep moving along with our big changes!

What’s your best or funniest moving story? Or your words of wisdom as we prep for moving?