David is doing Portuguese Duolingo on his phone.  A word that keeps popping up is amargo.  Bitter.  He can never remember if amargo is sour or bitter.

“Amargo is bitter,” I said.  “There’s another word that means sour.  It’s something kind of like that ama…ami…something.”

I looked it up: agrio.  Agrio is sour, but oddly, the word for bittersweet in Portuguese is agridoce, a contraction of sour and sweet, rather than bitter and sweet.  It’s the same in Spanish–agridulce.

Bittersweet is my predominant emotion right now.  Everything I do thrills me, but there’s a hum of melancholy underneath it.  For example, I feel giddy with accomplishment when I lug an trunk up 3 flights of stairs to a colleague’s office.  I drop off the trunk and walk back across campus with $20 in my pocket and a sinking sense of loss in my stomach.

I bought that trunk at the Target in Brooklyn shortly after I moved into my studio apartment in Park Slope.  The apartment was tiny, but it was my first apartment all to myself.  Rent alone ate up one of my two paychecks each month, and left me very little to work with when two thirds of my other paycheck went to my student loans from NYU.  Still, I loved my tiny apartment with a brick wall on one side.  It was so compact that I could sit on my couch and put my feet up on my bed. 

When I moved in, I didn’t have a coffee table.  Unlike Manhattan, Brooklyn had a Target, which felt like a good enough justification of my choice to move there.  The day after I moved in, I rode the subway to the Target on Atlantic Avenue and bought the dark-brown woven sweetgrass trunk.  I put a tray on top, and I stored my extra sheets inside it.

I was happy with my purchase, but everything in New York City exacts a price, so I had to carry the trunk home on the subway, sweating and huffing.  Stuffed inside it was a new quilt for my bed and other Target impulse knick-knacks.  By the time I got to my 4th floor apartment and set the trunk in front of my couch, I was swearing and my hands were blistered.

A few weeks later, I got a puppy.  It was the summer after my first year of teaching and I had two months of summer break ahead of me.  I didn’t have a boyfriend, and I’d always wanted a dog.  I rode the Long Island Rail Road out to the North Shore Animal League.  None of the grown dogs seemed like a good fit, and the puppies had almost all been claimed.  I wandered into the sick room for recovering puppies and found a little black and white guy rolling around happily in his cage.  I was told he was recovering from a dizzying list of ailments: upper respiratory infection, vomiting, diarrhea, a heart murmur, and anorexia.  I signed the papers, waited for them to call my reference, and the adoption was approved.  Papers signed, I asked the vet tech about how to get the 10 pound border collie mix home to Brooklyn.  “Most people drive here,” the woman said.  I had taken the train.  When I told her this, she offered me the boxes that they send cats home in, and I loaded my puppy in.

During the train-ride through Long Island, I decided to name him Django, after Django Reinhardt, the 1930s jazz guitarist who escaped the Nazis and lost a bunch of fingers.  Despite this, he was still the best guitarist of his age.  I transferred from the LIRR to the subway, and rode to my stop in Park Slope.  When I stepped onto the platform, I tripped on my own feet, and the box went tumbling out of my arms.  It landed with a thud on the concrete.  “Oh god!” I screamed.  I scooped the box up, ran up the stairs and down the 5 blocks to my apartment.  I raced up to the fourth floor and set the box down and opened it.  Django emerged, dragging his back legs behind him. “I broke his legs!” I screamed.  Then he yawned and stood up, on all his legs.  He had just been stretching in that bendy puppy way.  His fall onto the subway platform left no lasting effects.

In that first week, Django chewed on the corner of the sweetgrass trunk from Target, and I practiced my firm, dog-mother “No!”  It worked, and he didn’t chew it anymore.  After he’d overcome his anorexia and finished his meds, he started running crazed circles around the coffee table in a fit of puppy glee.

In 2011, we left New York carrying with us our bed, the trunk, and tons of books.  I was five months pregnant with our first baby, and we bought a bungalow with a fenced backyard.  Django ran in the backyard and the trunk served a variety of purposes over the past seven years, from holding blankets and rarely used winter sweaters, to the Halloween costumes of our first child, our second, and our third.  This spring, as we began shedding belongings for this move, I opened the trunk and gave away the old Halloween costumes and the sweaters–definitely superfluous in Brazil.  Now empty, I carried the trunk out to my car, and emailed the faculty advertising a $20 trunk.

The next day at school, as I set the trunk in my colleague’s office, I felt a pang. I almost told her I’d changed my mind–I couldn’t sell it.  My ten year old dog had chewed that corner as a puppy, then run hyper laps around it.  6 months after I adopted Django, my boyfriend and I kicked our feet up onto it on our magical fourth date.  (Reader, I married him.)  What will I do without that trunk?

It’s taken six months to understand, but I’ve learned that what matters is the memories, not the trunk.  I’m not giving away the memories.  I’ll always have those.  Isn’t it good I had that trunk when I did?  That it served me so well?

Thank you, trunk.

Goodbye, trunk.

For our upcoming move to Brazil in July, we are only taking 15 suitcases.  No furniture, no shipments.  For all five of us, just clothes, books, toys and kitchen items that will fit in suitcases on the plane.  Since November, we’ve been selling, donating, and giving our stuff away, preparing to eventually shed 95% of the contents of our house. 

As each weekend approaches, I start to peer into cabinets and closets. I find an excuse to go survey the basement crawl space. I’m making mental lists: the mitre saw, the Halloween decorations. The old coolers, the potty training toilet, the roasting pan and the ice cream maker. On Saturday morning, my hands are positively itching, and when the baby goes down for his nap, I throw on sneakers and head down into the crawl space.

Like a classic southern crawl space, it doesn’t literally require me to crawl, but it has unfinished dirt walls, exposed beams and a dirt floor. It has some patches of concrete poured onto the ground, but it’s basically a dirt room under my house. The walls show the red Tennessee clay that holds up our 1935 bungalow. I can see where tree roots were severed to dig the foundation, probably done by hand by someone grateful for job digging foundation holes after the Depression. And like a slowly-decomposing work of art, the dirt walls continuously shed a dermis of dust and dirt onto everything down there. The longer something has been sitting in the crawl space, the thicker the layer of red dust.

The dust is a way to date oblivion.

It’s creepy down there. The stairs are rattly and there are strange cricket-spider creatures. I inevitably track dirty footprints around the house when I emerge. But I also love it. That crawl space is living. It’s walls are slowly crumbling, dust to dust. It is the pull of entropy on my house, a measure of the passage of time. I don’t have the energy or desire to go down there and sweep up the dirt that mounds at the base of the earthen walls, but I could. I could fight the decomposition, or at least tidy it up. It would always win, though. And it’s just a room for storage. No one sees it but us. So we feel free to hide things in it, usually things we want to pretend don’t exist. It’s a room of decisions deferred. There’s the antique wood rocking chair that I rocked my firstborn in. I broke the caning on the back of the chair within the first few months. Perhaps I was rocking too vigorously, jamming my shoulder blades back too hard in my first-time-mom agony and exhaustion. Either way, the back split and so it went into the basement.

There’s the cable box we never connected and the landline phone for the line we canceled. The only people who called it were my dad and telemarketers. My fins and snorkeling mask are down there along with my scuba certification. Two camera tripods, even though I no longer own a camera. There’s a gourd that’s been painted to look like Santa. Baking dishes from dead grandmothers’ kitchens. Empty file folders. Ice skates and roller blades. This whole basement ages me. I don’t roller blade or scuba dive anymore. Honestly, my children might want those items before I ever get a chance to use them again.

It could be called the Kingdom of Might down there. I might need that landline again. I might want to rollerblade again some day. I might find someone who can re-cane that rocking chair.

No. No I won’t. I know that for sure now. It’s amazing to clear away all that might clutter. Now I focus on can. I can finish my next novel. I can move to South America in July. I can go blow bubbles outside with my kids instead of reorganizing all the crap I’m storing in the crawl space. And now that I’ve given away the rollerblades and the mitre saw and the empty folders, I am no longer burdened with the weight of all the things I might be doing, all the things clamoring for my attention.

I know now what deserves my attention. My family. My teaching. Travel. My writing. I don’t need a mitre saw or a snorkel. Those are not the things I wish I was doing. I want to be writing. Or reading a new book, or playing Memory with my kids.

And I can.