Linking up with Amber’s series on concrete abstractions. Today’s prompt: Box

She says to write about boxes, and I recoil. I follow a sailor around the globe, and boxes dominate the hard moments of my life, rife with difficult goodbyes and rocky beginnings. The boxes are always inadequate…no matter how carefully I fold, stack, and wrap, the boxes always bulge. The pictures of that day in Crystal Cove before we had to say goodbye to California, the owl from the year I taught in the desert. Somewhere are my grandmother’s felt elves and santas, the ones she gave me when she quit putting up her tree a few years before she died. There are adoption documents for my youngest son and the hospital bracelet that says “Baby boy G” before he had a name…before he was our “gift from God.” How do the boxes keep from bursting?

I can hardly breathe by the time the packing is done each time. The boxes are lined up in neat rows in every room of the house, creating walls to the past. They mock me with black permanent marker, claiming to hold “BOOKS” or “DISHES.” I want to be permanent like the marker, not transient like the box. When the trucks come and load the boxes, I stand in the street, my arms crossed at my waist, blink back tears, and murmur truths to myself…not home yet…not home yet. We won’t pass this way again—oh we may get orders back here, but the faces will have changed. We will have changed.

Our last night in Virginia, I was a steel wall, braced against more goodbyes. The truck was packed, the house clean, the boxes on their way to Japan or storage or Arizona. We hugged neighbors who cried, but I was a double reinforced corrugated box. No tears left…until…my sweet four-year-old friend Garett who lived three doors down couldn’t sleep. He made his momma bring him back outside to hug me one more time. As I hugged his little frame, the grief smashed me open. I wouldn’t be driving my son and Garett and the others to gymnastics on Tuesday or Thursday anymore. I couldn’t pack Garett’s small voice that always began, “’Scuse me, Miss Sue?” I couldn’t pack my cursed doorbell that rang all day long, heralding my front-toothless friends who wanted to play—how I miss those little faces. I couldn’t take a truck-full of boys’ laughter as I told them tales about the four dashing princes who save the princess sisters from the spiders on the way to preschool. There are no boxes for these stories…for these treasures. It worries me that I will forget…that they will forget. My tears and weak hugs and promises to keep in touch were all I could offer. It was all I had.

Somehow though, despite the boxes or perhaps because of the boxes, our world is enlarged a bit each time we move. Our boxes only mark a small place in time and space. We grieve, accept, and celebrate our tilt-a-whirl life, knowing God uses these boxes to teach us to hold things of this earth lightly. If tomorrow all the boxes were gone, we would still be rich beyond words. We’ve only been in Okinawa six months, but I already know I will weep to leave…that my boxes will be lined with Okinawa sand that we will be hard pressed to sweep away.