One Move is the Equivalent of Three Fires

One Move is the Equivalent of Three Fires June 27, 2019

This was one of my dad’s most common sayings, although Google let me know it isn’t original to him. (My favorite thing found while Googling the phrase: a moving company in Kiev who used it as an actual slogan in a darkly humorous way). Over the past month we have been moving, and it’s been hard enough to find my hairbrush, let alone to blog.

Moving makes you think about your relationship to the physical objects in your life. Do I need this book now that I have it on Kindle? Well, so-and-so gave me the physical copy twenty-three years ago while we were walking in the park and now I haven’t heard from so-and-so in years and it’s a sweet memory, so yes. If I am surviving just fine living out of a suitcase with three changes of clothes, what the heck am I unpacking all these boxes for? I guess I don’t want to have three changes of clothes for the next twenty years, maybe? Should I become a monk or a nun? It would cut down on having to make a lot of choices. This is the first time I’ve moved when I seriously started considering that as a career option, if I could bring my husband along. Why do we all even do this to ourselves? Why do objects mean things to us? Why do we desire comfort?

If, like me, you are someone who depends very heavily for your sanity on having things stay where you put them, like the Entwives, moving will test that sanity. Every step of progress through your to-do list is won at overwhelming psychological, and sometimes physical, cost. This task requires the computer charger. Where are the letter openers? We have cereal, but where did I put the spoons?

Anyway, I’ve found the computer (and the charger), and the Internet, and the spoons, and the letter openers, and I’m back.

I can’t get Dad back, though.

Image: Unsplash


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