A red letter day! We put the first boxes in storage. This gave Tom a chance to rent his preferred method of transportation, a pickup truck. (Tom and truck pictured above.) It was a black Nissan Zipcar named Florencia the Frontier. (If you don’t have Zipcars in your ‘hood, it’s an hourly vehicle rental service with cars parked conveniently around the city, and they all have names that go with their species, such as Harry Hundai and Felicia Ford. It’s adorable.)

So we stacked everything up in Florencia, all the light stuff that’s safely packed in boxes to give us an illusion of progress, and drove it ten blocks to the storage place. (I wished we had a large dog to stand in the back of the pickup with his head in the wind and his tail wagging.)

We loaded two carts with our boxes, hauled them to the second floor of the warehouse, and lined them up on one wall. They looked absolutely minuscule. This was the same stuff that had completely overwhelmed our hallway this very morning.

These boxes include things we would want when we settle again, if ever. But we have no idea where that is. In a way that makes it easier: store only what we want to keep. Not everything we might need or could use. Just what we love. And at a certain age, the things you love become fewer, while the experiences you love become more numerous. Today was one of those experiences.

As so often happens, this much-dreaded chore did not take as long as we expected, nor was it as terrible. But Tom didn’t want to give up the truck yet, so we drove to a place called Carton World and got two bales of bubble wrap for pictures and fragilities. In Oregon, we call that saving a tree. And supporting a domestic oil well.