Storyteller genius, Donald Davis, says not to ask old people what they remember about their childhoods.
Instead, he says you should ask about their childhood home. Or their third grade classroom. Or the hard church pew they sat on every Sunday. In other words, if you want to retrieve a memory, access the location where it's stored. Open the door and go inside the space where it happened.
Since we've been married, we've gathered a whole collection of spaces.
And here we go again. Arizona. For a good job. To the place we will be when we make that final student loan payment before the end of the year. I will experience that victory in a sunny spot on the globe.
You wouldn't know it from all our gypsying, but we really hate moving. We had a sweet babysitting swap with some friends in the neighborhood. My sweetie girl has a crush on one of the boys in nursery. When we first boxed up my books last week, I cried.
And maybe I'm making too much of this, but I've been thinking about how we simultaneously live in the spaces by which we access those memories later. By leaving that space, we have to accept that another chapter in our lives has closed—those moments are now memories, and not the present. Time keeps moving and so do we.
I know which memories happened in this familiar space, but I haven't yet seen which ones happen in the new one. We always seem to fall in love where we're living, though, so I'm hopeful and excited. Each move, we're just as reluctant to leave as the last.
So here's to fabulous memories in new spaces. And here are some of my favorite images of the one we've just left—where things have been so happy, sometimes hard, and altogether wonderful. If some young whippersnapper ever asks me about that basement apartment I lived in down the street from the bakery, I'll say it was one of my favorites.
