I’ve been thinking: As often happens when people move to a different place to live, they often find themselves worrying if they’ll be ‘happy.’ After a while they may reach a ‘middling place’ where they are able to decide or begin to decide how they feel. I’ve been in the ‘not so’ happy stage for a long time, now, almost ten years. It’s not that I’m still feeling burdened, as was at first, but I have not yet reached the deciding middling place I need.

The reason is I still cling to the memories of the left behind people, times and places I was familiar with. Most of them are pleasant memories, as remembered, although some are not as much until fixed-up in my mind. I remember them all.

Also, of concern when moving is that for various reasons, one will not be able to keep all the things they had and loved or want to keep. When I was a youngster every time we moved we had to shed some of our belongings like chickens will shed feathers in a puddle hole: curtains didn’t fit windows in the new place, the stove was the wrong size, and the kitchen linoleum was too small...

Unlike those people who unfortunately must preface the loss of their treasured possessions with such words as “I lived all (or most of) my life in the house where I was born,” I am in some ways lucky I did not grow up in the house in which I was born. But that does not stop me from remembering it. I have lots of pictures, too, of me in a market basket on the lawn.

It really wasn’t a house in the regular sense of the word; it was a single-story hip roof storage barn, fixed up quickly to provide housing for a needy young couple: my daddy and mommy who were awaiting my arrival. The barn sat on city property, and it would soon be winter, but Daddy, a carpenter by trade, provided his workman’s hands and tools to hurry up the transformation.

At that stage it would seem moving would never be a problem… right? Well things change, people change and ideas change.

Many years and many moves later, memories became, by nature, increasingly more important to us. Although curtains still never fit, and a stove would stay behind because a better one existed, we learned different ways of doing things, gained new and different possessions, and met people we would never forget.

Life changes and we do, too, which is fine and expected, but in the move something else is often lost: a feeling of sameness, and I still miss that.