Threshold times
Changing houses makes me come untethered
It’s Saturday as I write this piece, and I’m taking a break from packing and cleaning, the standard process of erasing myself from a temporary home. As this piece lands in your inbox Sunday morning, I’m making my way from Connecticut to D.C. to my next space. My next few days will be all about figuring out the new home with new routines. Just let me get some coffee and the new cat fed, and then I’ll figure out how to live my life here for the next little while.
I think most of us experience the “doorway effect” from time to time, where you walk into a room and then forget why you came in. Whether it’s real or not, the concept describes the notion that passing through a doorway or over a threshold has a destabilizing effect on cognition.
Operating without a fixed address gives me opportunities to make like Robert Louis Stevenson and “follow this way or that as the freak takes you.”* But pet and house sitting comes with obligations that constrain that freewheeling life. And that’s a good thing: without those constraints, I run a risk of lapsing into a privileged form of detachment and isolation. Having property and animals to care for gives me a sense of connection despite being a stranger. And sometimes I get lucky enough to make lifelong friendships with the owners despite our brief acquaintance.
For me, changing houses is a period of internal chaos. I have my most intense dreams in the lead-up to moving. This week, it was a bear chasing me into a cabin with a rickety door. When I get to the new place, I’ll inevitably wake up at least once not knowing where I am. I’ll have disconcerting moments of déja vu. I’m confident I’ll make multiple wrong turns, in the city and in the house.
When I move into an unfamiliar home and become its temporary custodian, I don a temporary identity. I adjust my patterns to the patterns of the animals who live here. I adapt to the cat’s feeding schedule, I learn the dog’s commands. Food prep in each house is a new dance for me to learn, the reaches and turns from fridge to sink to stove to cupboards.
Despite my lack of coordination, I love to dance. When I get the steps wrong—a lot of the time—it’s fun or funny or at least promises to make a good story one day. And on those precious occasions when I get the moves right, it feels like flying.
I think these liminal periods when I’m moving out of one home and moving into the next are the times when I feel my spirit at its fullest. Lisa Moore wrote, “We are most ourselves when we are changing.”** During my threshold times, I’m uncertain, a little bit fearful, and there’s a ghost of some long-dead moral imperative in my psyche moaning a word that sounds like wreckless or helpless or hapless. But my curiosity is ablaze, and I feel vital in a way I never did in my more cautious youth.
*From Robert Louis Stevenson via Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.
**From the short story “Mouths, Open” published in Open by Lisa Moore.