Packing Our Lives

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Just a weekend to go, and my brother coming home means we need to get packing right now. An old promise to my mom makes itself heard - that we have to liberate her garage of all the stuff we did not bring to Africa with us! Meaning hordes of unsorted goods in cardboard boxes. Things we forgot about since us leaving the country in January. Winter coming soon to Sweden and mom needs to be able to get her car into the garage without having to run over our stuff.

Late at night we start. After spending our last weekday in Sweden at our friends' son's 2nd birthday party and dinner at our old neighbor's house. We rented a "släpkärra" to be able to transport everything. It is one thing to pack, lift and stack. That is mostly physical. You get sweaty and your muscles ache. But it is a whole other ballgame to see all those material parts of your earlier life lay in boxes to be stowed away until further notice. That is emotional. And quite depressing. Probably, those things that symbolize our "real" permanent sort of life, will be in the storage for years to come.

We already experienced some of that heartache when we set up our home together in Sweden for the first time in 2004. I had lived in an apartmentup until 1997 together with my ex, before I left for Latin America. The stuff I had there was nothing of value. And Karen had just left her parents home to go live with me and she didn't bring more than a toothbrush to our common home. So when we arrived in 2004 to Sweden we literally started from scratch. Nice in a way, because you start out together. But depressing in another way because of the complete lack of history and roots. I don't want everything new and shiny. I like old furniture. Gifts from family and friends. Used stuff with character and personality. Old books with signatures and written dedications in them. But we had nothing of the sorts.

Now I know that we will have to go through all of that again in a couple of years when we leave Africa to set up base somewhere else. Start all over again. Almost.

The thing is that when you know you are in a country for a limited time and the house you live in belongs to someone else you naturally do not put too much of an effort into the residence. You make it cosy alright, but not in a permanent sort of way. You do not invest emotionally or economically in that temporal life. So when you leave that place, you do not have much to bring with you that really matters for you.

So I guess that what you have to learn is to build your life of more immaterial goods; Memories. Histories. Photos. Art. Music. Smells. Time together. And most important of all - friends and relations with other lost souls.
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