Details of the arrangements made to move from a big house crammed with stuff to France are mostly boring and rarely funny. But for simplifying our lives, it was cathartic. Every item in our house fit into one of five piles. Pile one was what we could carry in backpacks to Aix-en-Provence. Not two pairs of jeans, but one pair of jeans. Not 10 t-shirts, but three. Not every Apple device we owned. Pile two held possessions we could not live without for one year, and were shipped to Provence. They had to be essential, and also cool enough for France; mostly clothes with such international cachet we would be mistaken for Europeans. In theory. Pile three was stored in Vancouver, items we still wanted, but were too personal, precious or sentimental for our house renters to touch or see. My favourite coffee mug. High school yearbooks. Three hundred vinyl record albums. The fourth pile wasn’t technically a pile, but everything we left in our house, such as furniture and dishes and our second-best corkscrew. Our renters needed the fourth pile to live. Anything not fitting in the first four piles warranted pile five. This was garbage, and it was the biggest pile. Several trips to the dump and the Salvation Army later, I wondered why I was keeping garbage in my house. I was never going to fix that broken chair in the basement. Why was I saving that old fax machine? Did I need my old electric drill, the one with the broken chuck and the hopelessly twisted cord? The five-pile program required ruthlessness and a strong sense of letting go. It was the kind of process which picked up steam over time – with practice, we became increasingly inclined to throw our possessions into pile five. And the more we put into pile five, the better we felt.
Once the junk was gone, our personal items were in storage, and our cool French-like clothes were shipped, we were left in our large house, still our house, for one more day. All we had were backpacks in what suddenly felt like a cavernous, empty space. There were no personal photos, my bookcases were half empty, my office looked antiseptic and cold. The enormous nude painting I made of Carol 20 years ago, while I went through my celebrated Blue Period, was in storage. The wall looked naked without Carol’s nakedness. I didn’t feel like myself walking around my tidy house, without my personal belongings on display. How could I be me if I wasn’t surrounded by my important possessions?
The feeling of disconnectedness intensified the next day, the day of our flight to France. Wandering around our house, I walked through the looking glass, into a skewed reflection of my comfortable environment. It looked like my house, but it seemed like someone else was already living there. I was unsettled by the layer of non-reality covering every surface inside my almost-house. While we waited for our neighbor Jake to drive us to the airport, I made a frantic tour of the house. A sheen of sweat collected on my forehead. Everything was perfect and ready for our renters. I walked out the door for the last time in a year, and the feeling of finality was overwhelming. I was excited, but also afraid. And vulnerable…..it seemed that all I owned was on my back, all I had to face the world, exposed.
“Did you lock the front door, Billy?” said Carol in jest, as Jake backed the car out of the driveway.
“Of course I did. Well, I’m sure I did. Stop the car, Jake, I’d better go check,” I said.
Reaching the porch, I saw that not only had I forgotten to lock the door, but in my discombobulatedness, I had left it wide open. It’s a good thing I went back, as we were going to be overseas for a year.
