The Psychology of Moving

I am a serial mover. I have moved twelve times since I moved away from home at the age of 18. Let me clarify that I define moving as the packing up of all possessions, the permanent removal of one’s self from what was home for a time, and the transporting of life and all its accoutrements to a new place of residence. Moving, really moving. In this number of twelve, I am not including going back to Minnesota between university years to spend summers working at coffee shops, painting schools and nanny-ing awesome kids. Nor am I counting the move to Vermont for the summer of 2008. The green mountains surrounding Middlebury were a very temporary home indeed, but it was the perfect escape from my life at the moment. And for that, I’ll always be grateful for the memories of days spent in the library, of evenings swimming in the state of the art pool and running in those silent hills. No, for moving, I’m counting the times when the place I slept became home, my taxes arrived in the mailbox, the walls were decorated with my pictures, and I cooked dinner while listening to On Point and looked forward to drinking my coffee curled up with a book on Saturday mornings.

When I first moved to Boston in 1997, I walked off the airplane with two suitcases, neither of which had wheels. I traveled about the city on public transit to arrive at the first of three separate places which would become home on Bay State Road. Then there was the apartment on Commonwealth Ave, where we had the break-in and I lost my grandma’s jewelry. In Brookline, I lived on avenues University Road, Clark Road, Alton Place and Beacon Street. In Southie, I spent two years spent living along the legendary St. Patty’s day parade route, just a block or two from the housing projects and the Patrick Gavin School. And finally there was Roxbury, on Cedar Park, with a backyard garden to die for, the nicest landlord I’ve had and great roommates.

As for my non-Bostonian living, I've been in Tunisia six months now. And I am reflecting on how easily we can adapt to new environments. Living here is not difficult in the least. The food is good, the people are open and friendly, the weather is great, hot but it’s no oppressive sub-Saharan heat. I can ignore irritating men and their comments reflecting a state of continual weakness and frustration. I love walking in the souks, and above all I love the vegetable and fruit markets. And the view of the sea. When I lived in Niger, I also felt comfortable, which is a little shocking as it is not a comfortable place to live. The food is extremely different, the climate one of the harshest on earth. Yet, just as I finally do in Tunis, I began to identify things as mine: my bread guy, my pagne-seller, my tailor (who painted J-Crew in red paint over the door of his shop). There was my lizard who crawled onto the metal frame at the foot of my bed each night to do his little push-ups and eat mosquitoes as they tried desperately to find holes in my mosquito netting. Each night, as the temperature dipped to a crisp 98 degrees, he would poke his pointy, little head (very little, he could not have been more than 2 inches long) over the rim of the frame and reach one little tiny lizard hand up and hoist himself up to lie parallel along the bar. And the lizard's routine became mine. I waited to fall asleep until I saw him. Thanked him for eating the mosquitoes and worried a bit that if he ate a malarial mosquito would he, my little lizard, get malaria. So quickly had I developed affection for this little creature that I was quite upset on the terrible day when roommate stepped on and killed him. I carried its little corpse outside and buried it in the sand. Woefully I announced to my teacher the next morning that "Djama ay danfana wii" (Djama killed my lizard.) She found this hilarious and laughed until she was crying. I managed to laugh too, but I am very in touch with my inner five-year old who was very upset that she was laughing. Poor little lizard, he was like a guardian angel to me, protecting me from scary African diseases, sitting at the edge of my bed and wishing me sweet, malaria-free dreams!

Madrid too became mine, but in a far more anonymous way. A foreigner in a city with lots of foreigners, I was typical and uninteresting. Well, except when I was running in the streets with Jonielle training for the marathon. Oh, that made us a bit of a spectacle! And it’s fun to be a spectacle. I developed a kinship to the Metro, to Rioja, to returning home at 4 a.m. and to my French and Moroccan friends. Tunis is a fantastic middle ground between the false-familiarity of Europe and the time-travel of West Africa. There are a lot of tourists here, but they can’t say anything in Derja. So I look like them, but by opening my mouth can set myself apart, into the far nicer category of temporary resident who is studying, who appreciates the language and culture for more than cheap goods in the market that come from China anyhow.

I am pleased knowing that I can adapt to almost any environment; can live in temperatures hovering at 140 degrees, can learn to eat just about anything and could care less about the damn water pressure. So long as I have a place to sleep, food to eat, drinkable water, and pleasant ways to occupy my time, I can adjust. Despite my ease at adapting, my own personal psychology of moving is troubling. I fit everywhere and nowhere. I love Boston, but I’m not of Boston. I am very much Minnesotan, but I rarely feel that I belong there. This sensation of out-of-place-ness is an old one for me. I remember feeling very clearly and painfully as I was about to leave the hospital when I was ten that I didn't want to stay in the hospital (sad as I was to see the IV drip of morphine go), but I didn't want to go home either. I felt out of place, felt that I really belonged nowhere at the moment. I’ve never resolved that dilemma, and the limbo continues.

When I first lived in Southie, I spent my initial weeks dreaming of caves, and being trapped and suffocating, the walls were falling in on me. These nightmares reflected my desire to be back in Brookline, which was comfortable and familiar. I belonged in Southie (or so my name would suggest) and I didn’t. My house was a reflection of the new Boston, with a mix of white, black and Indian Americans roommates. We belonged insofar as our multi-ethnic house sat at the edge of black Dorchester and white Southie. But we didn’t, we, the college-educated young people, were nestled awkwardly in the old, working-class Boston. It was a fascinating experiment, but there was a clear understanding of the non-permanence of our living situation.

Coolidge Corner is my favorite neighborhood in Boston. There I could step outside my front door and go the Brookline Booksmith, see an independent film, eat great Indian food, and buy fairly-traded jewelry from everywhere. Roxbury was a bit of a shock, as my house was so far from the T, yet for the first time I had a real back yard and a garden. The breezes that would blow into the kitchen brought an incredible smell of flowers whose names I cannot be bothered to learn. But it was so residential, too residential. And therefore I didn’t really feel at home. Roxbury was too calm, but Brookline was too rich. So while I can live anywhere, no place feels completely like home. There's the fact that I've never really left Minnesota, kind of like all the Irish writers who physically left Ireland and never, ever left psychologically. Not unlike them, my moving is always characterized by a state of hesitance. I've never bought housing, always rented, always wanting and needing to be ready to leave if I have to.

I woke this past Monday surprised to find myself back in my apartment in Tunis, where I’ve lived since February. After my two week vacation in Europe it was so amusing to see Tunis as the normal, as the mundane life I’ve been living. I went about doing errands and found it nice to walk through the markets, saw my vendors again, and they asked me where I had been. I renewed a new month at my gym. Weinik kunti? Where were you? And welcome back! I guess I can now count living in Tunis as move number thirteen. With a backpack and a suitcase I arrived in February, and I took classes, visited cities, saw the south, saw the north, met lots of Italians and a few Tunisians. Returned back to my apartment tired after a breathless vacation, and settled back into a routine. So it’s home. But not for long.

In August 2009, almost, almost a year ago, I moved out of Boston. Not knowing if it would be permanent. I very half-assedly, haphazardly packed up my life and its accoutrements. Now I need to find a place for that life. It may involve the moving of all my current orphaned things from Boston to MN. That will be onerous, as it would consist in moving twelve years of books, wine glasses, and beautiful things from the beautiful places I’ve lived, things that I cannot part with. Now where do all these things belong? Where does their owner belong?!

I’ve decided that this fall, I will try to belong in MN. I am looking forward to the experience of living, and this time I plan on really living, in MN. It will never be my Boston, and I will not insult either with unfair comparisons. This time, I will not skip along on the thin upper layers of Minnesota, as I have done since the day I left in August 1997, that moment when I let my Minnesota life freeze, remain of a time that no longer exists. Each summer, each Christmas, I’ve gone back to visit a still-life version of the something I once lived. My life a frozen replica surrounded by that which continued to expand and grow. When I left Eileen was thirteen. She’s twenty-five. Rosemary was forty-six, this October she turns sixty. That a lot of life to revive.

No more, I will try to live in my new, old home state as I’ve lived in Tunis, making genuine efforts at meeting people, finding kindred spirits, exploring places I don’t know. I will try to wandering around with interest and curiosity, will chat with the people who work and live in areas I don't know. I am really looking forward to this experiment.

But, I know myself well, and I have a feeling that fourteen is not the final number.