Like so many others this past holiday season, I spent a lot of time unwrapping things — slicing tape off brown boxes, digging through packing materials and unearthing items from layers of paper. Unlike others, however, my mother and I had first removed these boxes from a freezing cold storage unit off of Route 78, where they had been deposited nearly six months ago. After boarding with family and friends since we sold our house in the beginning of December, my mother was finally able to move into her new condo, a few miles away from the town where my sister and I grew up. We were determined to make it feel like a home by the time Christmas rolled around.
For days we shuffled around the space, armed with clothes and furniture sliders. Would the couch still fit if we rotated it 90 degrees? How did we have my grandmother’s watercolor paintings arranged in the old house? What if we switched out the sideboard by the dining room table for the one in the entryway? At first it felt natural to try to recreate the home that my mother had curated for nearly a quarter of a century — but each piece that wouldn’t fit in the new space felt like a small defeat. As we attempted to fill the gaps in our memories with pictures from the real-estate brochure, it began to feel less like decorating a house and more like building a set.
Last year, after my dad passed away, my family and I were determined to recreate every aspect of our traditional holiday season, clinging to anything that could make us feel more normal. Thanksgiving featured my best approximation of the special, gluten-free gravy he used to make for my Celiac sister. We hosted Christmas on his side of the family like always, and I accompanied my mother to the New Year’s Eve party that my parents had attended for nearly 20 years, where old friends dedicated the midnight champagne toast to his memory. But, in trying to replicate the house we had lived in all our lives, were we setting the stage for another year of repeat performances?
It was hard to shake the feeling that we were living in a scale model of our old life — something vital was missing. So this year, we opted to try something new. My sister’s boyfriend joined us for the weekend, we skipped our traditional church service in favor of quiet cocktails at home on Christmas Eve and allowed my grandmother to host an early Christmas dinner instead of having people over like we normally did. Like our favorite green leather couch or the end tables that my parents picked out from their favorite antique store in Lancaster, some traditions just weren’t going to fit into our new space.
Beginning my final semester of my undergraduate career, I’m well aware of the fact that more big changes lie on the horizon. Soon, I will be trying to fit my daily rituals — breakfast with my roommates at our round kitchen table or late night study sessions at the same desk in Alderman — into a new schedule in a city I have yet to choose. What if my bedroom furniture doesn’t fit in my new apartment? What will my living room be like without my roommate’s elephant painting?
I’ve come to accept that certain things aren’t going to fit into our lives as we enter new chapters and that attempting to recreate our settings might be doing more harm than good. I am still learning how to remember my experiences without memorializing them. With graduation approaching and my time at the University coming to an end, I’m going to need a pretty spacious storage unit to hold all my memories of this wonderful place.
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