Only a few months since our wedding, Jeff and I are in the process of sorting through all of our worldly possessions and preparing for a move across the country. It’s a long and sometimes tedious process (after three straight days of organizing and clearing out the basement, last night I dreamt of carrying boxes endlessly up and down stairs). It’s also an on-going lesson in letting go. Even for our modest lifestyles, Jeff and I both brought a lot of Stuff into our marriage, physically and metaphorically. Now’s the time to open up those boxes we’ve been moving from one place to another for the past decade and reevaluate what needs to make the next leg of the journey, and what can stay behind. So far, we’ve already donated seven bags of clothes, fifteen boxes of miscellaneous household items, and eight or nine pieces of furniture. It’s a process of cleansing as much as it is a process of sharing and gratitude.

And it has me thinking about two years ago, when I first moved in with Jeff. Things are definitely different now — instead of worrying about fitting in with a new family, I spend more time wondering what life will be like in a new city, in a new state, so far away from the Pennsylvania mountains and rolling hills that I’ve lived with all my life. But some things stay the same: it’s still about building foundations, finding our footing, and taking that next step together…..

I stand in the living room, my cords thickly covered with lint and smears of dust, my face flecked with dirt and sweat, my lower back protesting the past few hours of kneeling, stretching, lifting and sorting. On the coffee table is a teetering pile of objects, the last of all my earthly possessions gathered from the four corners of my apartment — and in front of me, is the empty box.

I began the process of moving in with my partner, Jeff, about four weeks ago, although I have been unofficially staying at his place for several months now. Still, his sparsely-furnished duplex never felt exactly like “home.” For me, home was my adorable, retro-style one-bedroom on the second floor of a warm brick building. It was the first apartment I ever lived in on my own, the first apartment where I could walk around naked after a shower on a hot summer afternoon, the first apartment where I was free from the worry of loud or lazy roommates, the first apartment where I could come home from work exhausted and lonely and indulge the urge to curl up and cry without having to feel guilty or ashamed.

This is home: when I first moved in, I painted the walls in the living room a blue so pale, so close to true white, that at first they’d made the ceiling look yellowed like old paper. A second coat, and there it was, that ice blue rippling over the texture of the swirled plaster, cool and silent like peace, like solitude. Now, without the wall art, they look so bare and cold again, and I stand frozen over the final empty box, scanning the collection of handmade pottery and glass bottles and delicate metal candleholders gathered together on the square teak coffee table. All the little décor items that wouldn’t fit anywhere else, that seemed too fragile or too essential to pack up in the preceding weeks. But today is my last day of packing boxes, and within another week the apartment will be empty of everything except stripped down and deconstructed furniture, ready for a deep cleaning and the coat of paint that will bring the walls back to the requisite off-white semi-gloss.

For a while I was nervous about moving in with Jeff. My apartment always smelled of incense and essential oils, or the sweet fragrance of fresh laundry, or the wild scent of trees or rain coming in through the wide-open windows. These were smells that welcomed, but demanded nothing; that soothed and comforted without insistence or expectation. But on weekends, Jeff’s place smelled like children, and the detergents and soaps their mother used at her house during the week. I would come over after a long day of work to a household full of kids who were (despite all stereotypes about children being flatly full of wonder and laughter) complicated and complete individuals, human beings who had grown up for the last decade in another household, living with very different values and expectations. I began to realize how hard it was to live with someone else’s kids, to take in stride the stress and demands they carried over from a week with their mother.

The hardest part was always feeling like a guest, a burden the kids soon outgrew but that lingered for me despite spending almost all of my time at the house. It was the feeling of not being able to ask for that space and solitude that we introverts so desperately need at times, of feeling uneasy about putting up the boundaries I was so skillful and graceful at raising and lowering at will when I was at work or with friends. It was the feeling that these were not my dishes in the cabinets or my food-stuffs in the fridge, and so it was not my place to organize or cook or take out the trash, or to ask anyone else to do those things when the clutter or the stomach-growling started to get to me. It would be rude of me to ask, and likewise rude of me to turn down any request made on my energy or time. Or at least this was what I told myself, what I felt intuitively in this place-that-wasn’t-home. I could retreat to the bedroom, to the bed that Jeff and I shared that was now covered with my own soft comforter… but this led to restlessness and even to bouts of sickness that lasted longer than any I have experienced in the years since graduating college. Being sick was one of the ways I could claim some kind of exemption, some relief from the role of guest, and my body took advantage of that fact whether I wanted it to or not.

And so, for a while, I worried about moving in. But last week, the last of my kitchen supplies made the migration and found a new place in the cabinets and pantry that had so long stood only half-filled with Jeff’s collection of solo items: one pot, one pan, one skillet, one mixing bowl, one box of tea, one can of green beans. Now, the orange juice in the fridge sloshes in the sunflower-yellow pitcher I used in summers past to make fruit slushies, and the black speckled spaghetti pot I inherited from my father sits prominently next to the huge metal soup pot I used one year in college to make stew for an entire dormitory floor. And there is a joy that I feel creeping out from the corners of this kitchen now, a wholeness, a sense of fitting, of settling in. There is a plumpness here now that feels like… home.

With the empty box at my feet, it occurs to me that this is really why moving is stressful. It isn’t the time or the heavy lifting, it isn’t even the sense of dislocation or uncertain newness. It is this decision we face whenever we pack up our lives into boxes stuffed full of old newspaper: the decision about what to put on the bottom. It’s the choice we must make about what foundation to build on, about which of our many possessions and assets — whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual — can bear the weight. It’s a choice I have faced with every single box I packed over the past several weeks, and it never gets easier. It is always daunting and difficult and full of doubt. My apartment was full of beautiful objects: pieces of art given to me by loved ones, sculptures and statues chosen in moments of excitement and appreciation, delicate spiraling twigs and feathers and special stones gathered during meandering walks in the nearby woods. Now everything that transformed this boring box of living space into a home with fringe and feeling is waiting in a heap to be placed carefully, reverentially, into this flimsy cardboard box. Placed with uncertainty, and resolve, and best of all, hope.

This is not about domestic bliss or good womanly womanhood.* This is about memories; this is about a sense of self. This is about living embodied in the pool of materials and understanding how my existence has been shaped by the contours and shades of the landscape through which I move. Learning to move is about learning to use our feet, learning to trust that the bones and muscles and joints will bear our weight and carry us forward. And moving from a place that was home, to a place that will become home, is about learning to trust in that same kind of foundation, and seeking that same kind of motion, learning to stand on our feet instead of trundling along on our knees.

Jeff has long since opened his home to me and invited me to come inside. It’s finally starting to dawn on me that it’s time to step up and enter in, to participate, and to trust that the foundations that I have built in making my first home alone are strong enough to bear the weight of partnership, family and a future together.

*It is perhaps unfortunate that the kitchen is the first room to be completely moved and unpacked, since it might leave you with the impression that I, like “all women,” identify most keenly with the domestic life of cooking and cleaning. This is just a bad coincidence, I assure you, but it cannot be avoided.