High holy days and moving disasters

Close your eyes and imagine a well lived in house, one that has been, lovingly at first, collecting memories and papers and tools and utensils and decorations and books and clothes and shoes and furniture and silk flowers and knick-knacks and cleaning supplies and dishes and linens and pictures...and...and...and for over 50 years. The paper fills filing cabinets and overflows onto desks and counters and tables and nightstands and beds and...and...and. Now imagine having to face sorting and tossing and packing and moving to another state in just over a month. That is how I spend most of my summer, helping my mother take on a new adventure in Colorado.

Sorting and tossing is easier for some of us. I am a tosser...a donator of stuff. I have stopped buying things that need dusting and now limit my souvenirs to small pins that fit on my day pack. Things that are not worn or used in a year move on to new homes. My brother was completely antithetical to this. He bought and stored and packed things around him for comfort and joy and to match his theory that "he who dies with the most toys, wins."

But back to my Mother's house. There was a memory attached to each item, and she made a yeoman's effort at letting go, but we still ended up having the movers take more than she would be able to use. And that is where the wild adventure began.

The first movers did not have room for everything on the first truck. So they told us a second truck would be there in an  hour to pick up the rest of her belongings. My girl friend and I opened some wine and sat in the almost empty house waiting for the next truck. Hours passed. We called the company and hit brick walls and promises. We waited some more. And finally....cheers....the second truck arrived. And...you have to guess at this point...they did not have room for her belongings. As you might imagine a very heated phone conversation followed.

The next day I was on the phone early trying to get an idea if this company could pick up everything they had stranded me with. By the end of the evening I had my answer...no. And of course I only had one more day to get everything out before the new owners took possession. Believe it or not if you google something like emergency movers, there are companies that pop up. I called one and they...miracle of miracles...were there in four hours and packed and loaded and stored everything else with plans to put it on a truck to Denver.

Back to the first movers who had headed down the road with the majority of the contents of the house. What are your guesses? Alien abduction? Highjacked to Canada? Swallowed by a sink hole? No, nothing that good. Just an accident with the truck rolling twice, bursting open and spewing my mom's belongings, all the things she could not bear to part with, across the Mojave desert. Yes...really.

What happens in a situation like this? Well the DOT steps in and calls the shots. Anything blocking the highway is pushed off so that traffic can flow. And what is in one piece is picked up and put in boxes and loaded on a truck and delivered. Everything, even if it is attached to barbed wire or is full of desert rocks. Did I mention that there was more than one family's belongings on the truck and that they mingled wildly has they danced across the sand? 

That is how I came to spend a long Labor Day weekend in a storage unit sorting their stuff from mom's stuff from trash. For hours...and days. In the end we had 25%...one quarter... of the load that we started with. And all of this happening in the month of Elul, just days before Rosh Hashanah. 

I was ready to ask G-d for a sticky note, some detailed explanation of this crazy experience. What was the point? A friend of my, a very religious friend, suggested that I look at this as a blessing from Hashem. This is what was supposed to happen. And so I tried.

And amazingly, it started to make sense. Our memories are not held in our material items, but in the depth of our hearts. The memories we wish to return to are full of love and laughter and tenderness and kindness and humanness...all of which are etched deeply in our minds and souls. We are like pieces of spiritual clay molded by our experiences and memories.

But we are not "done" in the way that a statue or painting is completed at some point. There is always more that we are becoming, that perhaps Hashem is wanting us to become. Holding on tightly to who we were years ago, or even yesterday, keeps us from embracing the next future that is waiting for us. And if that future is challenging and frightening, a few comforting memories will help us, but not the entire collection. I can only cling to one teddy bear at a time. 

And so perhaps this was the lesson, and the reason that some where in the desert a coyote is sitting on a red overstuffed chair wearing an outfit from Chicos, a jaunty men's hat, reading a romance novel and wondering who sent him these wonderful gifts. The old stuff needs to be left behind so that we have room for a new life. We cannot bring all our old memories, good and bad, and expect to build a new future. We cannot cling to what was and become someone profoundly new.

OK, so this is not really such a new lesson. I know that. But wow....this one came with the force of a hurricane or tornado. 

L'shana Tova. May you leave the book of last year behind you and walk bravely into the book of life before you.