Something's Gotta Give

Today, we were packing up some boxes and Fred stumbled upon five vintage cashmere sweaters. Cashmere sweaters which I had thought he accidentally threw away years ago. I had bought them for a couple of dollars apiece with the intention of reselling them at a vintage store, so I had considered the loss to be more annoying than painful. It was a nice surprise. I am not sure what I will do with the sweaters in the long run, but for now, my closet has annexed them (in case you have forgotten, the portion of my brain which is dedicated to these things has the same attitude toward clothing that Bismarck had toward German Princely States). So I was trying (and failing) to pack up some of my sweaters and found myself saying the words which I never believed it possible for a human being to utter, words which, frankly, sound like heresy: "I think I own too many cashmere sweaters."

Clearly the impending move is driving me insane. And people wonder why I have no will to knit right now.

I forgot how much stress moving caused. Or rather, I remembered precisely how much stress moving causes which is why we haven't moved in nine years. The stress, in this case, is compounded by our not having a clear date when we will actually move; we have been "moving in a couple of weeks" for a month now and while we seem a lot closer to moving than we were last week, we haven't yet scheduled a date for the burly men with the big trucks to haul our sofa and china cabinet. We are trying to be proactive, trying to address our growing sense of dislocation and dis-ease by packing up stuff. Nothing of value, nothing we feel we need available to us at all times, nothing we are so attached to we would be sad if we lost it. (Of course all my Neil Gaiman and Salman Rushdie books are still on the shelves, as are my journals and my copy of my thesis. It probably goes without saying that all my clothes seem incapable of leaving my closet).

The problem, for me, is that while I know intellectually that the big items are relatively easy and the small things are what kills you when you move, emotionally, I feel like we have made no progress and that it is just impossible to even imagine we will be able to move. We'll have to live here forever because we keep finding more clothes hidden away in a corner or a box we had thought was empty.

So it is slowly beginning to dawn on me that I may be spreading myself thin. The irresistible force of moving (added to the equally irresistible forces of raising a child and agreeing to understudy a show which opens in the middle of September) is meeting the immovable objects that are my desire to write and develop all the ideas flitting around in my brain. Yes, I want to be witty and profound, and, like The Stone Roses before me, adored. But I have to be realistic about all this and maybe, just maybe, accept that I can't do it all right now. I may have to let my ego step aside for a bit or it may be flattened by the steamroller of current events.