Member-only story
Reflections on Identity
Packing Up a Life and Marriage
When It’s Time to Move On
A photo pops up on my phone on Sunday evening. I open it and quickly glance at it while stirring a pot of soup. I squint to make out the image without my reading glasses: two stacks of translucent plastic bins, five in all.
“What am I looking at?” I text back.
“Your stuff!” responds D, my ex-husband. “I put it all nicely in storage for you, so you can go through it at your convenience. I paid for two months, so no rush!”
I see right through his exclamation points— his attempt to mask guilt with enthusiasm. He and I both know what this really is: I am, finally, being kicked out of his house. The exclamation points do not soften the blow.
I recall some of what is in these bins: the white eyelet dress I wore to my parents’ wedding, a stuffed white dog that my father gave me when I visited him in the hospital before he died, a biography of the dancer Maria Tallchief my mother bought for me when I was sick with bronchitis in the third grade.
I picture these items with vivid detail despite not having looked at them in over twenty years: the 95 cent price tag in the top right corner of the book, the jaunty red beret on the stuffed dog’s head, the kelly green trim on the eyelet dress. Safely ensconced in sturdy plastic bins that have been sitting in the basement of my — now his — country house, they have sat untouched since leaving my childhood bedroom, until today’s eviction.
The house itself transferred to my ex-husband in the divorce, which was one of the most painful parts of the divorce to accept. I loved that house in a way that I have loved few things in my life — unremarkable from the outside but with a panoramic view of the Catskill Mountains behind which, every night, we would pause whatever we were doing to watch the sun dip down.
The sky itself was part of the house, the turquoise blue of crispy cold days, the pink streaks left behind when the sun set, the soft yellow haze of August heatwaves, all of it on full display behind windows that stretched up more than twenty feet in the main room. As I baked muffins with blueberries I picked from my garden, played board games with the kids…
