moving house

I've moved three times in the past year. Last May, it was getting all of my stuff out of faux-apartment college housing when we graduated. At the end of the summer, my boyfriend and I schlepped our things from upstate New York to California. And at the beginning of May 2008, we moved exactly nine-tenths of a mile to the West. I'm tired of moving, and yet I still feel a little bit restless, like I should keep the packing tape handy.

The first of these moves was inevitable. Vassar College wasn't going to let me stay in the "Terrace Apartments" for the rest of my life, and that's definitely a good thing for both of us. That was mostly about packing up crap I didn't really need anymore (MLA style guide, leftover liquor, DVD collection) and lugging it across the country in my station wagon, two college chums in tow, to stash at my parents' house in New Mexico.

The second time, I was fresh off my graduation trip to Europe with my sister, and cajoled into helping my boyfriend pack up his massive music collection and various odds and ends. It was eerily familiar-- we were only across the river from Vassar, after all-- and oppressive Hudson Valley humidity was again present throughout all of the proceedings. K, my boyfriend, insisted on keeping everything: pencil stubs, cracked CD cases, coverless books. We made a couple trips to the salvation army with old clothes and electric blankets, but we pretty much managed to fit his entire room, plus his seventeen pound cat, Wynona, into his Honda Civic. I set off across the country for the second time in one summer, this time with boy and kitty. We managed the drive in three days, then stopped off in Santa Fe to get my car, plus all the crap I'd dumped at my parents' in June. All of this was hauled to California.

When we arrived in Oakland, we arranged our stuff haphazardly at a dumpy-but-recently-painted apartment picked out by a friend of mine, and our roommate for eight months. The apartment was serviceable, but not ideal, and we hightailed it out of there as soon as our lease was up. (We were living by a freeway overpass. Between the traffic and the junkies, it was too much).

Now we live not terribly far away, in a cute three-room duplex with a shared backyard. It's nice. For now. Our lease is for six months (finished at the end of October) and as much as I detest moving, this feels just right for us. We have a healthy four-year-old cat, and a dog who's still pretty much a puppy; we're in a long-term relationship with each other-- all of these things are commitments that are going to require years of our lives, and I'm OK with that. But we're not yet ready to sign a year lease.

We might move back to New York, for one thing. Or New Mexico. I don't think we'll move again within California, even I'm not that masochistic. Our lives are pretty portable right now. The thought of peeling packing tape off of my dishes again gives me a headache, and the more trips to IKEA we take, the more cheap furniture I'm going to have to make decisions about whether to keep or not the next time we uproot. Moving is definitely on my list of least favorite activities ever, right up there with sitting in traffic, getting sick, and twelve-hour flights in coach. But in spite of all of this, I want the flexibility of a six-month lease, and the ability to take off if something better comes along. I'm more attached to my favorite pair of jeans than I am to our current living situation-- and don't get me wrong, I really like our new place. I think because I grew up in one house, where my parents still live, I don't necessarily need my own solid "home" right now, at least not in the physical sense.

I'm willing to put myself through moving hell until I find one place (maybe a 1910 adobe? A 1795 farmhouse?) that is too good not to stay at forever, worth designing my life (career, family, recreational pursuits) around. Until then, give me month-to-month.