Tonight is my last night in the Beach Hut.  Tomorrow I am picking up a U-Haul truck and moving the remaining contents over to the Windward side of the island into my new home (Beach Hut 2.0).  Moving is no big thing for me, as I’ve lived in over a dozen places, at this point it’s a regular enough occurrence in my life that it can be done with relative efficiency and without much stress.

I was recently speaking to a friend who said that it took her at least two years to feel comfortable somewhere and to make it her ‘home’.  It seemed reasonable at the time, but if I’ve lived in over a dozen places in twenty-five years, then I’ve lived in each place an average of less than two years.   By her standards, I’d never have felt comfortable or at ‘home’.  I think I have (since some of those moves were shorter, and others longer), but maybe I haven’t.  Maybe I don’t know what having a ‘home’ feels like.   Maybe I never will.  Maybe I don’t need to, since I can find my way to being comfortable just about anywhere.

Normally before a move, I go through most of my belongings and throw out, sell, donate various goods to cut down on the amount that needs to be moved (since you are going through it anyway and putting it into boxes, might as well get rid of the things you don’t want to bother lugging around).  This move however marks the first in which I didn’t get rid of anything.  I threw out a broken fan, and a $1 plastic inflatable raft (that a visitor bought).  That’s it.

I’ve almost reached the point where I have absolutely nothing that I want to get rid of.  I say almost, because I found myself keeping (and thus packing and moving) things that I know I want to get rid of.  Why did I keep it?  Because I was afraid that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have anything to get rid of once I arrive at my new home.  I think I might be a little scared of what life would be like without anything to get rid of.

There once lived a bohemian homeless Harvard graduate (class of 1911) by the name of Joe Gould who used to frequent the villages of NYC and once said this of himself:

“There’s nothing accidental about me, I’ll tell you what it took to make me what I am today.  It took old Yankee blood, an overwhelming aversion to possessions, four years of Harvard, and twenty-five years of beating the living hell out of my insides with bad hooch and bad food.”

Something tells me Joe Gould and I would have been great friends.