Little Boxes and Big

 I am sitting at my makeshift kitchen table with the mismatched Ottomans. Contemplating. The boxes behind the bakers rack have been piled up there now for more than a month. I plan to fold them up and put them in The Constant Storage for the next time I need to move. I will do this  because as lessons go, we learn that boxes, toilet paper, half bottles of expensive shampoo and all that 'crap' that you want to throw into the trash bin when moving so you don't have to schlep it around  - that crap costs money to repurchase. 'I have become money conscientious', I say to myself smugly. {My family who use me as a textbook example of wild abandon shake their heads collectively}

There is a subtler truth though. Zebra's don't really change their stripes, silly family.

It is this: even though I know it won't last long, I think I am muddling about in various stages of grief.

The scoop:
Recently we all moved out of the lulling Mother Home and my free spirit allowed itself to reawaken, giving in to my life long love of travel. Through my adolescence we moved to far flung places in the world with my dashing army officer father. During my 20's and 30's I made Europe and the two US coasts a priority. I opened up businesses, married,  researched, worked and had plenty of adventures. That was fun.
Now, more fun. Working the deep blue currents, taking care with family, dreaming and talking more than doing: that was over. The chance came. We moved. And the move changed everything.

But was temporary.
And we are back...home?

 I look at the boxes in my kitchen, so many I can barely get out the back door,  as sort of a talisman. For now, I am processing  'that which could have been but was not' and the boxes stay.  Everyday, a bit at a time, I guess, I will have to indulge in all the things that I experienced that brought me further along my path in the world by moving.  Soon, the boxes will get thrown away (I'm not really going to change my ways after all these years!) and eventually my emotions will have incorporated this constantly mentioned but still often unexpected motto: change must become second nature to an adventurous heart.