I have Unpacker's Block

So, all my things arrived off the boat from Australia last Friday morning. As the day loomed, I was filled with more and more dread, and had a secret wish that the vessel Eagle II would have an ocean-going accident (all crew aboard rescued of course) and all my boxes would sink to the bottom of the sea, Life of Pi-style. Appleton so far has had a clean, pure, Zen-like simplicity to it. My furnished apartment provides me everything I need, without having to think about it. Once my stuff arrived, I knew I would have to replace all the furnished things with things of my own (not just big stuff like the master bed, but little stuff like the dust pan and the carrot peeler and the shower curtains), and each one of those things would require decisions from me. Price point, new or used, colour, style, what day to deliver, how to deliver if it was used, etc etc. You try it, readers, you try to do a planned, responsible, efficient, cost-effective purchase of a carrot peeler, and tell me how you go. They are available too many places. There are too many options. You can't do it, you just have to end up doing an impulse buy of a carrot peeler, first one you see, based on emotion and convenience rather than price and responsibility. But when you're doing that with a bed, the stakes are a bit higher and the potential lost financial upside opportunities much greater. That is, if I end up just buying the first pretty bed I see and paying extra for delivery, compare that strategy to scouting around and finding someone who can give me their bed for free. Could end up being thousands of dollars.

Anyway, so the day came, the stuff arrived, I unwrapped my big painting right away, before I went back to work, but everything else has just been sitting there ever since. I was away last weekend, but I was here all week, and I haven't cracked one box, any of those evenings.

This morning I made a tiny start. I still didn't open a box, I just unwrapped a small cabinet from the protective white packing the movers had wrapped it in. It was standing on one end, too, and I wanted to get it down on its feet. So, I just did that just now. Took the Swiss Army Knife, cut through the tape, unwrapped the wrapping, stood the cabinet on its feet and dragged it over to a little spot in my entryway where I think it will look okay.

So, if you stand back just a little bit, you can see my big painting and this little cabinet at the same time.

And I'm realising maybe why I have a bit of unpacker's block. We bought that little cabinet at the end of a Christmas trip, the first year S. and I lived in Newcastle. We had moved down together in the old jag in March. We'd scrimped and saved and lived sitting on the floor for months and months. I got my first web job. We lived by the beach. By Christmas everything was starting to be pretty good. We went up for a week to Barrington Tops, staying in a holiday house called Gumnut Cottage. It looked out over a wide hill, to gum trees. It had native bushes outside the front that attracted little bitty native honey-eater sorts of birds (this prompted the purchase of a Birds of Australia guide book that we used all the time the next year when we moved to the Central Coast). A mangy pony came by all the time, and about three little wallabies would stand in the yard watching us carefully. The furniture inside the house was much nicer than we had at home. One night we built a fire in the little grate outside and had a bang-up barbeque feast - chicken, roasted corn, vegetables, nice wine. (We tried to repeat the exact same feast a few nights later but the coals got too hot and everything burned - terrible disappointment and the lesson that you can't always recapture the past.) Also, we had brought the old beige PC (Windows 3.0 on it), with its unweildy big beige monitor, and had found a phone jack that was active, and had the local dial-up number for the ISP that I was working for at the time, so we had internet access the whole time, and that was the first time I saw the original South Park viral video, before the show was even started.

We went on long drives through the rain forest, and parked and walked down to a little waterfall. I had the wrong shoes on, but it was gorgeous and worth the trouble to get there. We at one point went over a rock or something in the jag, and the muffler was so rusted out that it shattered, so we had a hole in the muffler from then until we found a good mechanic in Blacktown, later when we were living on the Central Coast and I was working in Castle Hill, and he put in a glamorous shiny new stainless steel exhaust, which still looked good the day I gave the jag away.

We didn't want to leave Gumnut Cottage, but on the day we did we took a meandering drive and ended up at a little store out in the country, outside of Dungog. I think he saw the little cabinet first. It's low, with two rows of five little square drawers that are about 4" x 4". It looks antique, but it was new. It's pine, finished in a honey coloured stain that didn't match anything else we owned but somehow fits in. The drawers aren't exactly true, some of them stick when you try to pull them out and some don't close all the way. But it was the first piece of nice furniture we ever bought together, and it was the first piece of furniture I ever bought that didn't really serve a purpose, it was just pretty.

Here it is, now. Now, it's here. It sits next to the painting and reminds me of my life over there.

I think that'll do me, for this weekend. I think everything else needs to stay in its boxes for a bit, and I'm going to get dressed and go out into my new town, and live in the future, and make it the Now.