My worldly belongings

A back-blip. I tried to get a shot of Reyes and Jake, the men who did the heavy lifting, but all my shots of them are back-lit and useless. They were seldom in the same place at the same time. Jake, who appears to be a young college guy on summer break, carried the lamps and pillows and occasionally helped Reyes carry the largest and most unwieldy things. Reyes, who seems to be in his mid-thirties, wielded the dolly and single-handedly moved every book I own and almost every pound of weight.

This is all the boxes, each one carefully packed, including kitchen, library, and everything but the clothes, which a friend and I brought down on hangers. There is a row of boxes behind and slightly lower than the back row that shows in this picture. The furniture, of course, is in addition to this lot. It took Reyes and Jake an hour and twenty minutes to move all my stuff down one flight of stairs. I carried the light stuff, the rug, and a couple of grocery-carts full of odds and ends.

I look at it all: each stone, each book, each picture is a treasure representing people, places, adventures, risks, mistakes, a few achievements and many failures. So little. I have whittled it all down to a kind of distillate of a life's wanderings. And what is it, really, but a handful of dust. My dust. For now, I'm holding onto it.