I moved this week. I can’t find my running shoes so I hiked in flip flops this morning. For awhile I couldn’t find the charger for this computer and watched that little power percentage number up in the right hand corner dwindling with the feeling of my life fading away. I have bags and plastic bins filled with odd assortments of papers and little objects that I decided to pack at the last minute in spite of Marie Kondo’s advice about keeping only things that bring me joy. Who knew I had so much stuff? Where did all these clothes come from? I only wear jeans and black sweaters or t-shirts .

Moving is like a strange planet you land on – all you can think about is attempting to get organized. At the last minute you find yourself packing things like a cowboy hat you haven’t worn for a decade or a plaster hand print from a middle aged daughter’s kindergarten art project. I arrived to teach my weekly class without any notes because I had no Internet and couldn’t connect to my own syllabus.

My email account on Verizon disappeared in the middle of all this, which initially gave me a panic attack, but then an odd feeling of calm. What could be so important that I had to instantly read about it?

The day after I moved in the outside of my building was painted and all my windows were covered and sealed up so it was like living in a submarine.(See photo above.) Nelson is confused and if I leave without him he starts barking and I get texts from my oldest and dearest friend who lives next door alerting me that all my new neighbors are not pleased. I have jury duty in a few weeks. Taxes are due soon. I have about two hundred pages of my students’ work to read by next Wednesday.

But as I’ve typed this the painters have begun removing the window coverings and I hadn’t realized that the view of trees from my desk was so totally gorgeous. Or that when you can see the sky you can breathe again. I have a fireplace and a lot of bookcases here. It’s a good place to land while I write my new memoir and figure out what to do next with my life. And writing a memoir (or an essay or a poem or journal entries) is the best way to figure out where you’re going in life.