Packing The Five Senses

It seems as if I'm giving more and more thought to my actual move to Merida and what I'll bring.

I won't be bring furnishings.  Here in town, several homes along the Hudson were lost during Hurricane Sandy and once everything is sorted out I know my furniture will come to good use.

Some older books will have to come with me.  It's said that of all the five senses, smell is the one most closely related to memory.  I can open a book and the scent of the pages brings me back to my grandparents' home on the Long Island Sound in the 1950's.   It was a magical place and our refuge from New York City summers.  I've vowed never to own a Kindle.

Looking through my mother's old photo albums reminds me of her sense of adventure.  Her holding a three toed sloth somewhere in Central America or the photo she took with a disposable camera of Denali from a small four seater plane.  I can see her the way I remember her...smiling and alive. Those albums will have to come too.

I'll take a few old kitchen items that you can't seem to find anymore or that work better than anything made today.  There's the aluminum cookie press with the little discs that we'd take out every Christmas to make sugar cookies.  We'd put those horrible, tiny silver balls on them that would crack a tooth and red and green sugar sprinkles.  The taste of a sugar cookie can carry me away to every happy Christmas I've known.  Oh, and my grandmother's hand grinder will have a home in my new cocina too.

My thirty eight year old, handmade Favilla guitar will end up in Merida also.  For years, I played regularly and occasionally made a little money playing a few gigs.  Haven't played for years but I'm thinking that living in Merida will allow me time to pick it up and play...if only just for my own enjoyment.

Then there's my mother's Chiwara.  It's a beautiful Mali headdress that stands close to three feet high.  She bought it  just when her sight was starting to go.  She said she would still be able to appreciate it when she could no longer see.  I'll also bring the pieces of Inuit soapstone she left me.  She liked to think of sculpture as Braille art.

I have a friend in Chuburna Puerto who relocated from Norway.  He brought his great grandparents' clock, his clothes and two massive Greyhounds.  The dogs were shipped to Mexico City and he drove the 800 miles east.  Temperature might have been the reason.  I've read that you can't transport animals if the temperature exceeds 85 degrees Fahrenheit at time of takeoff or landing.

Figuring out how to get my things to Mexico is going to take a lot of planning but I've got to find a house first.