Dawn’s mom Beth is moving out of her house and downsizing to a senior living community. She’s lived in this house since 1982, so it’s a big deal. If memories are like fallen leaves on the ground then the soil is rich here and the memories run deep. For me, about 25 years.

The first is Dawn’s dad Dick at the end of the kitchen bar on the other side of the counter. Sitting there with a sleeve of Ritz crackers, maybe a jar of cream cheese or butter. Newspaper crossword puzzle halved lengthwise, pencil in hand.

He was a wonderfully warm man. Ex-military, Coloradan, worked in the steel scrap business as a traveling salesman. They had these whiskey high-ball glasses with a western theme stenciled on the side, saddles and steers, and when the kids were young Dick would have Dawn and her brother Rick add the whiskey and ice to his drinks. He’d shout from the other room, fill it to the rope!

We lived at this house for almost a year after Dick died and our kids were still in diapers. That’s when the economy fell out in 2008 and we’d just sold our first house. We stayed with Beth to keep her company and to wait out the market until the time was right to buy a bigger place. That took about two years. My mom’s husband John died the same year as Dick so we moved in with her too, in Germany.

All the memories and nostalgia aside, what’s most confronting about moving out of a house is our relationship with things. The things multiply and give the illusion of having more meaning than they do. But when you put space constraints on things, a lot doesn’t make the cut. You wind up selling, discarding, or giving away a lot. Or just carrying the problem of too many things with you, to your next house.

Beth is resolved to deal with it all. She’s made notes for every room, taking stock and listing action items. It’s a big house. You find a lot you forgot about the more you look.

Yesterday we were by the rec room, the large closet at the bottom of the stairs where they used to keep the booze. It was a makeshift wine cellar, dark and cool. Alone on a shelf stood a bottle of that demon, aged Dutch gin called Bols, that came in the heavy ceramic bottles. It must have been a gift from my stepdad John to Dick, and clearly they’d never cracked it. It caught me dead in my tracks.

I could picture that shady Spanish border town where John, my mom and I would travel on Sundays to stock up on Bols, Spanish wine, terracotta planters, cheese, olives, whatever riches we could fit in the back of our old Mercedes. La Jonquera, that was the name of the town. Bols made Dutch gin but there were two kinds: the young, and the “oude.” The oude was hard to find and rare, but for some reason this oddball Spanish town had loads of it, and cheap. So when we were living in France in the late 90s, John bought cases of it. And we consumed cases of it.

If there was one sensory experience that informed my alcoholism this may be it. John kept the Bols in the freezer and served it in these little Scandinavian liqueur glasses after dinner. It came out syrupy and went down easy, with a bite at the end. The effect was like an intravenous, immediate high. A mainline to my brain.

Before 9/11 I hauled loads of 5 liter wine cubes and heavy bottles of Bols back from Europe to Seattle. I worked hard to transfer the bohemian European lifestyle to my urban American setting. So much of the romance I associated with that carefree living came with the drink, a genie in a bottle.

I stood in the doorway of Beth’s rec room and felt the Bols tug on me. I wasn’t tempted to drink it per se, I was just reminded of my craving. Call it a disease, whatever, it had a magnetic pull. I found myself circling the house and randomly returning to the same spot to look at it. Why?

Last year I wrote about cording. I was fascinated by this shamanistic image and idea we can get psychically attached to things. Like through an actual cord. Because it feels that way to me, with certain things, like I’m tied to them. And maybe that’s part of what’s so exhausting when you move, it’s freeing yourself from all these little cords that resist being clipped.

The problem is, a lot of things hold genuine sentimental value and can’t be replaced. The older you get, the more you accrue. And then you make the mistake of dumping things you’ll later regret.

That’s because there’s a real power to certain objects and things: a co-mingling of souls, when people trade letters or gifts. I think it helps remind us we are not alone. And as we go back to the ground ourselves it’s the only thing we can take with us, the knowledge we’ve lived and loved, we’ve been here. And that is perhaps the most important thing.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, existentialism, Nostalgia, spirituality