The first boxes are easy. They are hauled off the truck and stacked in their own little pyramid. Each labeled with neat handwriting and bold marker. Important. Open first.
D. K. Wall:They were packed by a person filled with energy and optimism, a person who believed the whole move would be organized. This time. Bless that person. They tried.
D. K. Wall:It's a half dozen cartons, maybe a dozen, holding the critical items for that first night in a new home.
D. K. Wall:Sheets and pillows for the bed, bathroom necessities, snacks to fuel your energy, pots and pans to cook the inaugural dinner, plates, glasses, and silverware, probably paper and plastic.
D. K. Wall:Perhaps there's a carefully packed bottle of wine with the corkscrew, a lesson from the last move when you learned it makes quicker work of a cork than a pocket knife.
D. K. Wall:Or maybe it's a six pack of beer tucked into the empty refrigerator on arrival so it will be chilled.
D. K. Wall:Whatever it is in those first boxes, there's little question about whether you need the contents or where they belong. You make quick work of them and feel pleased with your organizational skills.
D. K. Wall:Then you tackle the muddled middle. Maybe you wait until the second day. Maybe, energetic, you crack a few open that first night after a sip or two of that hard won wine gives you confidence.
D. K. Wall:Clothes, cookware, cleaning supplies, light bulbs. You place them quickly enough. Maybe not as fast as the first.
D. K. Wall:A few, you rethink and shift somewhere new, not yet confident of the flow of the house. One person puts the coffee mugs in the cabinet by the sink.
D. K. Wall:The other shifts them to the cabinet by the coffee maker. And mysteriously, they return to the sink because, apparently, this is a decision worthy of a committee.
D. K. Wall:But there's never a question whether they're needed, only where to find them when the need arises.
D. K. Wall:Ultimately, though, you come to the last boxes. Perhaps it's a few days in, maybe a week or two. Some of them may not have been opened since the last move or the one before that.
D. K. Wall:There's a certain kind of box that simply migrates from house to house, a permanent resident of every storeroom you've ever had, sealed with tape that has yellowed and cracked with age. But you know they're needed. Probably.
D. K. Wall:The questionable labels add to the mystery. Is the box with electronics scrawled on the end mission critical or parts to a hi fi that last played a note in the disco era?
D. K. Wall:Is memorabilia full of keepsakes that will bring tears to your eyes, treasures from long gone friends and relatives? Or is it a box of head scratchers that leave you wishing you had inherited Aunt Velma's ancient habit of writing names on the backs of photographs?
D. K. Wall:And then there's the box labeled, with breathtaking confidence, miscellaneous. As if anyone has ever opened a box marked miscellaneous and found the contents anything less than an anthropological mystery waiting to be unearthed.
D. K. Wall:No matter. You persevere. The labels be damned. You rip off the tape, open the lid, and stare inside. Questions bounce through your mind.
D. K. Wall:A stack of old DVDs. Would be fun to watch if and when you ever own a DVD player again, but you don't dare throw them away.
D. K. Wall:How many people still have a copy of the movie Pink Floyd's The Wall? You're fairly certain you last watched it with a roomful of college buddies who could recite every lyric.
D. K. Wall:So you do the only thing you can. You gently close the lid, slide the box aside, and resolve to alphabetize the disc soon or maybe next year, only off chance some other box contains a working DVD player.
D. K. Wall:The next box labeled simply cords is a treasure trove, a charger for a BlackBerry, a tangle of USB A cords patiently awaiting the collapse of the USB C world.
D. K. Wall:A power supply for a laptop that hasn't seen a lap in a decade, assuming the laptop itself still exists and wasn't scrapped for circuit boards long ago.
D. K. Wall:There's a white cable with a connector you don't recognize at all for a device you cannot picture made by a company that may no longer exist.
D. K. Wall:You will keep it forever. The day you finally throw it out is the day you discover exactly what it powered.
D. K. Wall:And, of course, on the very bottom, tauntingly lies a cord for a DVD player, long separated from its machine.
D. K. Wall:And then the lid comes off the ultimate prize, the junk box, which didn't even make it to miscellaneous. Compiled, of course, from the contents of every junk drawer in the old house.
D. K. Wall:A ziplock bag of foreign coins. Dutch gilders kept in case they ever abandoned the euro, a wad of Venezuelan bolivars that might once have bought a nice dinner and now couldn't be exchanged for a stick of gum.
D. K. Wall:Coins clank from every corner of the globe, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, India, and an assortment of pesos you can never tell apart from one another.
D. K. Wall:Beneath the coins, a bundle of business cards bound in a fraying rubber band. The names long forgotten, the titles obsolete, the phone numbers dead. You smile at the prominent listing of fax numbers and the absence of email addresses.
D. K. Wall:Few of those people are still at the same companies having moved on in their careers or more likely retired or worse.
D. K. Wall:Each one represents a handshake you no longer remember, a conference you couldn't name, A promise to stay in touch that neither of you kept.
D. K. Wall:And yet the rubber band stays on, and the cards return to their place in the box. It feels rude somehow to throw away a person's name.
D. K. Wall:Below that, a mishmash of paper clips, post it notes, pens that gave up their ink years ago, and enough refrigerator magnets to assemble a new refrigerator. You surrender. Move to the next box.
D. K. Wall:Next three, actually. Tax returns. Supporting documents. Every year going back to the days you were 12 and had a paper route. You can probably assume you'll never be audited for the physical year of your big wheel and baseball card budget, but you never know for sure.
D. K. Wall:Somewhere in the fine print, you're convinced is a clause requiring you to keep these until the heat death of the universe. So you do.
D. K. Wall:The IRS and you have an understanding. You will never look at these papers again, and neither will they, but you'll both sleep better knowing they exist.
D. K. Wall:Next to that sits a box of appliance manuals, most of them yellowed and fraying for appliances you're fairly certain remain at the old house or the one before that or at an address long forgotten.
D. K. Wall:Still, they might be worth something. Should the ghost of a years old microwave ever return needing a reference on defrost settings, you will be ready. People prepared in such a way are heroes in certain corners of Reddit.
D. K. Wall:After shuffling the boxes from spot to spot, you decide to stack them in the storeroom's corner to be unpacked whenever the energy arrives, which might not be before the next move or maybe not even then.
D. K. Wall:Because here's the thing about those last boxes. They were never really about whether you'd use any of it. The DVDs, the dead chargers, the coins from countries you visited in another life. You know you'll never need them.
D. K. Wall:You keep them because throwing them away feels like discarding the person you used to be. The traveler with a pocket full of gilders, the college student who knew every lyric, the kid with the paper route.
D. K. Wall:Every box is a small taped up museum, and you are its only visitor. The exhibits are terrible. The curation is nonexistent. Admission is free, and no one comes. But you can't quite bring yourself to close it down.
D. K. Wall:So the boxes wait in the corner. And someday, at the next house, you'll haul them off the truck, stack them in a corner, and promise to go through them. Again.