The Boxes Will Keep
More beautiful than I left it.
I kind of didn’t want to go. I mean I did, but I didn’t.
We got the keys to our “forever” home several weeks ago, and have been slowly moving things in. The actual movers and boxes showed up the second week of June and I’d been up to my eyeballs in moving boxes. Unpacking feels like my profession. I asked one of our movers how many boxes he thought we had. He said about 180. I did some math (not one of my strengths) and determined, based on that number, that I had unpacked about 3,800 boxes in my lifetime. I posted about that on social media and fellow transients said I had grossly underestimated. When I actually signed the papers before the movers left, the actual number of boxes for this move was 238… and we had already moved over a lot of things ourselves in the few weeks prior. So for the sake of neat round numbers, let’s just say we average 250 boxes over 21 moves… that gonkulates to about 5,250 boxes that I have unpacked. I say “I unpacked”… and I mean “I unpacked”… I am literally the only one who unpacks boxes, but that is a post for another time. But, I digress. Suffice it to say I still had (have) quite a few boxes to unpack, and lots of organizing to do, and my sister invited me to go back to Chicago with her to walk back through our youth and childhood.
My transient existence has removed most of the sentimentality from my life. She, on the other hand, is one of the most sentimental people I know. She and my brothers are already “fighting” about what furniture they’ll inherit of my parents and grandparents, who got that childhood toy, favorite book, etc. I’m all like, “have at it”… So, this trip down memory lane was for her. I was going to be her wingman, her “emotional support” sister. I did zero planning, had zero expectations, and was quietly dreading a thing or two on the itinerary.
I was born in Chicago, and lived in Chicagoland until I left for college at eighteen, never really looking back. After our parents moved away, I had no reason to go back. I quietly filed Chicago under “where I used to be from” — past tense, a place I loved, and was proud to be from, but had let go of a little more each year.
A week of walking those streets brought all of it roaring back.
The strangest part was feeling completely at home and like a total stranger in the same afternoon. I knew which way the lake was. I knew that a real hot dog never comes with ketchup. I had taken many trips “downtown” on the train and knew which buses to take to the Sears Tower, Oak Street Beach, Ed Debevik’s, Gino’s East. But on this trip, we went to a Cubs game and rode the “L” for the very first time. Going to a Cubs game is one of the most Chicago things there is. We watched five innings, and with the Cubs up 5-0, left early to beat the crowd. We learned later that they’d lost 5-8. Some things do not change.
The city was more beautiful than I’d left it — the river, the parks greener than ever, the architecture more impressive than I remembered. I continued to be surprised by how much it still felt so familiar, yet knowing with absolute certainty that I will never live there again.
The word I finally landed on, somewhere between the lakefront and our old front porch, was heritage. It’s a different thing from home, and it took me thirty-five years and too many moves to feel the difference.
For most of my adult life I’ve felt unmoored — tethered to my husband and his career, never to a patch of ground. I used to grieve that a little, the not-having-a-place. But standing in the city and places that raised me, I realized I had it backwards. I was never homeless across all those moves. I was carrying home with me. Where you’re from isn’t an address you have to keep living at — it’s something you get to take with you anywhere you land, like anything that truly belongs to you.
I don’t want to move back to Chicago. But I’m from there, all the way down, and I’m proud of it in a way I hadn’t been in years.
I think the only reason I could finally feel that where I’m from is a gift instead of a closed chapter is that I have ground of my own now. That house full of boxes I almost didn’t want to leave? Putting down roots there, as exciting and unnerving as that still is, is exactly what made it safe to love where I started.
I went on that trip to support my sister. I came home with my own beginnings handed back to me, and a little more peace about the new roots I’m growing.
Sometimes you say yes to the very thing you’re dreading — the thing pulling you away from everything you think you’re supposed to be doing — and it hands you back something you didn’t even know you’d lost.
The boxes were still there when I got home. They’ll keep, but I’ll unpack them feeling a little lighter, and filled with gratitude.
