This morning I drank my coffee out of a delicate china tea cup, a wedding gift just unpacked after two years of marriage. At first the china stayed in boxes because we were on the hunt for the perfect cabinet. Later, it had to wait because we would move to Indianapolis for my husband’s job.

The house hunt didn’t move fast enough. We ended up in a string of temporary living quarters. But this story isn’t about the fact that we needed to move three times in one year. Not exactly. After two weekends of packing and hauling, with aching muscles, it’s the stuff I’ve been lugging around with me over the years that’s on my mind.

Each move has been a filter. Do I really need this? Why do we have two vegetable peelers? Oh look – here’s that box of mismatched cords we keep in case the mysterious devices that once depended on them emerge. There’s that unwanted gift, kept out of guilt. And so on. It’s curious why I’ve hung onto these things.

Despite being in a two bedroom apartment, we had rented a storage unit. Things like patio furniture and lawn tools all had no place, but we hoped to need them again soon. And why unpack things we could live without while the house hunt continued?

I spent a year with just the basics. Bare, white walls, none of the books I’ve read and loved, none of the art I’ve been collecting slowly. When a friend passed away this year, many photos of him were in a box, buried deep in the storage unit.

After a year of searching, my husband and I finally bought our new house. No more temporary. No more storage unit. Unpacking these things I haven’t seen for a year has been like reacquainting with past versions of myself. After sifting through some of the banal, the cords and what-nots, there were other, more powerful objects. I’ve never wanted to be defined by the stuff that I own, but some of it felt like pieces of me.

The flowery, very seventies blanket I napped on in preschool. The ceramic jar passed down through four generations of my family. I’d all but forgotten about the small, wooden doll, gifted to me by Annie, a mentally unbalanced customer of a cafe I worked in when I first moved to Chicago. Annie visited several times a week, or sometimes not for months, always bearing random gifts. Why do I keep this wooden doll? Because it brings me to a time when I first moved to Chicago, full of wonder and the unknown, surrounded by others equally mesmerized and uncertain.

This is how I can revisit that fuzziness of being newly engaged just by drinking my morning coffee from a fancy cup. I don’t want to be defined by this stuff, but I can’t help but surround myself with these things that tie me to a life fully lived. As long as I never need a storage unit again, I think it’ll be alright.

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Sara McGuyer works as an account strategist for Wise Elephant, as well as taking on some creative work independently at saramcguyer.com. In the past she has been a book shop manager, an events/pr coordinator and a   nonprofit marketing director. Always on the lookout for spikes in the trend-waves, Sara points out the uniquely effervescent with a diligently discerning editorial eye. Find her on twitter @sara_mc.

Tagged in: home, relocation, serenity, unpacking