Tuesday

Recently, while Sunshine was away, I turned a corner in the process of moving in. There are still piles of things here and there all over the apartment, plenty left to do, but everything's now sorted into the room it'll eventually be put away within. Everything looks as if it will eventually fit here. All the boxes and garbage are gone. Importantly, all of the shelves are where they will live for two years. I recently pointed out, in a letter to a friend, how very backward our moving experiences are from the way we've come to expect life to be: while all the stuff stays the same, the walls and the configurations into which we must reconstruct our home change completely, frequently. We were told at the outset of one professional tool to stave-off homesickness: do everything possible to arrange familiar spaces within these changing houses, at least to the extent that's possible. The moving in process took a long time in México because we had very many books and very few shelves. For weeks we shopped for whatever bookcases we could get our hands on. We searched Mexican Home Depot, Mexican Costco, the grocery stores; eventually, we finally had a place to put everything. Those shelves fit nicely turning the corner to frame our Mexican living room, facing two rented couches and a coffee table. We still have all these shelves now, but figuring out how they fit, like our shelves should, in this crazy drawn-out panorama of an apartment was a trial and error. I finally built our home backward from the way we've come to expect: the shelves turn a reverse corner from the dining room into the hall. It isn't the same, but it's similar, and the place feels like ours for once. [Cavin]