Peeling the Onion

There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
Bill Bryson, American Author

We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.
Winston Churchill, British Statesman, Prime Minister

I don’t really recall ever being knee-deep in anything. It seems like when buried deep in something, whatever the substance in which one is buried, harmlessly abates at the ankle or wells up past the shoulders. My recollection of past burials seems only to recall events in an all-or-nothin' manner. When trouncing out into oceans and lakes, I suppose there must have been a point shortly after the water level was shin-deep that I became knee-deep in the water. It is also entirely possible that before the water reached my knees, I dove under and began swimming.

Standing in the basement of the house of which my parents relocated seven years ago, I finally find myself steeped deeper than my ankles. Lately, I've been knee-deep in my past.

My folks are selling the house and moving into smaller environs. My sister leaves for college in fewer days than fingers on which to count them off and I’m a 27-year-old man living in the equivalent of his college dorm room.

In many ways, it’s time for us all to go.

My parents sold the house for nearly their asking price, an unheard of accomplishment considering the market. What they were able to maintain however in their original asking price, they were forced to compromise in time and comfort throughout the moving process.

From the date we sold the house, we were all given less than a month to pack up and leave. Currently, we have 18 days to scoop up and out. A clean 'n' jerk of our home.

Having planned to leave the familial nest (again) for the past 11 months, it would be inaccurate to claim that moving out is shocking my system. The theory of leaving is far different from the practice however, and wallowing both figuratively and literally in the remnants of my past is more difficult than I would have guessed.

At some point in every man’s life, he is expected to prioritize that which he has accumulated over time. The alternative to this would be to save everything, no matter how inconsequential, and become a hermit, living amongst baseball cards, broken toys and uncountable artifacts from past vacations.

I’ve kept these things (and more) because I felt without them I would have no way to account for my past. My blunt memory will only become duller with time. If I have proof of the way my world used to be, perhaps I would find meaning in it all. Each dusty copy of “Entertainment Weekly”, ripped comic book and videotaped Letterman interview is something that I imagined I would drag out and show someone someday. Why they would care about “Mad Magazine” or my sketchbook from 1994 was never a detail of which to concern myself. I was sure I would need to account for my past and so throwing it away was unthinkable.

But I’m knee deep in crap that hasn’t affected my life in years, perhaps decades and it’s time to say goodbye.

I’ve been told that home is where the heart is. I can’t recall who told me this, but it wasn’t Pliny the Elder, the Roman neophatonist credited with originating the adage, so I'll just assume I heard it on an episode of "The Dukes of Hazzard". Lately, I’ve thought a lot about this quote. My family is leaving the place I would classify as housing my heart. Perhaps Pliny meant for his message to signify overarching geographical locations. Instead of my house, perhaps the Elder would prefer for me to consider Illinois my home. I’d rather live in Chicago than Ontario, but I’d rather live in Ontario than DeKalb, so relegating the quotation to large pieces of earth doesn’t make sense.

So if we’re packing up and leaving the place in which my heart rests, should I assume that for a little while, I will be homeless?

With each box I haul out to the trash, I feel as if one less layer remains wrapped around my onion. The outside layers are faded, brittle and easily removed. With each layer sloughed off, a slightly more stinging, golden vegetable awaits underneath, until the onion appears wholly different from its original form.

And I guess that’s what remains scariest of all: favoring the acrid winds of change over the mild heft of familial comfort. I always assumed I’d move out of this house. I assumed I’d pack up my things into boxes and store them in a different basement or hang it all on different walls. But I also never quite imagined that there would be no place to run once I became disenchanted by those walls or that basement. I’m desperate to hang onto the sloughed off layers, uninterested for now, in the onion’s core.

If layers can be stripped and houses sold; memories faded and tossed into anonymous heaps, what remains? And where does it go?

If home is where the heart is, and I can’t go home again (as Bryson says in the opening of this blog) where am I?

What’s left after the rest of me is scattered into numerous anonymous heaps?