Pictured: A November afternoon about six years ago at our home in Palmer, AK. Wes riding his fat tire bike out of our driveway for a final sunny ride before the sun disappeared behind the ridge for the rest of the winter (not exaggerating: we lived in the “shadow”).
We’ve been slowly removing items from the U-Box this week. Propped against the shed Wes built earlier this year are both of our fat tire bikes. Wes knocked his tires yesterday and marveled that they held air for all of the three years the bike was in storage. Mine are a sad puddle of rubber crumpled beneath the weight of the bike.
After we sold our home in the winter of ’22 and prepared to move into the Airstream full time, we endured the Fun Task of auditing and dealing with all of our stuff. Any homeowner will tell you how stuff insidiously accrues to fill every available corner of the space you have. The process of distilling our belongings to only the most essential was one of Marie Kondo style joy-sparking (pictured: enlisting professional help identifying joy in our treasured Nick Cage pillow), endless Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace listings, and finally, moving what remained into a storage unit in Palmer.
Eventually we got sick of paying the monthly fee for the storage unit. We decided to bite the bullet and get our stuff from AK to our land in AZ. This was an official 2025 goal, and we laid out the steps to achieve it.
Step one addressed the issue of WTF are we going to do with our earthly belongings once they arrive in AZ. Enter: the Shed. (Mostly) Wes built it in a marathon of time and investment this past spring. I consulted and occasionally schlepped, dug, measured, and braced/held in place. I also took copious pictures and ensured the IPAs were cold at the end of each day.
Step two was getting our Stuff packed up and moved from AK to AZ. Some Googling, pricing, and spreadsheet-ing later we determined that the cheapest way was the use U-Haul’s U-Box program to coordinate the process fully remotely. This was far less time intensive and costly than doing the thing ourselves. U-Box would cost about $5,000 (vs $9,000 for renting the U-Haul, getting the flights, hotels, food, gas, etc). We integrated the cost into our monthly bills/accounting so we could squirrel away a little bit every month, and locked in the move over the summer. Amazingly, we worked with the same mover who originally moved us from our house! I can’t recommend Alan and his team enough. He FaceTimed me from our Palmer storage unit and helped me make decisions about what to keep/donate. And our stuff arrived from Alaska completely, incredibly, well packed and intact.
Being real: if I think too much about the sunk costs of what we-of-limited-and-erratic-income paid to pack, store, and ship our stuff my eyes start to slowly cross. So, I don’t go there. I remind myself that the truly finite resource in life is time, not money, and we’ve already made our choices. I focus instead on what this stuff represents to me and us.
One, the stuff is about time we won’t have to spend again: a full kitchen’s worth of essentials, some key furniture, tools, and devices/appliances. (It is also about time as a limited resource. I am reminded about the volume of time it took to organize/distill all of our belongings during the move, and that must be why our coveted spray bottle of Armor All made it into the pile of our most prized possessions. I digress).
Two, it’s about curation. Collectively, these belongings distill our taste and how we create a space we enjoy inhabiting. I love that lamp. I love the bright red KitchenAid my Aunt and Uncle got us for our wedding. The butcher block table is still one of my faves I’ve seen/used, and I can’t wait to set it up when we have a permanent structure here.
Three, and most importantly: our stuff is memories and connections, with our various phases of selves, each other, friends, and family. When I pick up the Nick Cage pillow, I marvel at how far he’s come and who gave it to me. Reesa has called dibs on Wes’ old metal toolbox used for camping gear and splatted with stickers as her inheritance. A jewelry holder reminds me of Janet; the Pit Vipers pleasantly splattered with red, white, and blue 90’s style decor were ceremoniously gifted to me by Wes for a birthday.
We spent part of yesterday paging through the scrapbooks Wes, Reesa, and I would painstakingly assemble every year while she was growing up. It took hours. Above is the collage from our wedding in 2013.
On the one hand, is it absurd to invest so much in stuff, ephemeral as it is? Yes. Yes it is. Am I happy we kept it? That it’s here, in the flesh, unscathed, and that we get to bring it north to Reno with us to share with Reesa and friends/fam this coming month?
You know the answer to that one. I am grateful for every layer of memory, including the ones we’re working on right now as we inventory and organize all these belongings here in this phase of our lives in Arizona. Honestly it makes me marvel at what’s possible in this world even in one so-very-tiny, yet so incredibly full, life span.