Yesterday, our shipment from the States arrived! All 663 pounds of our belongings. Technically, most of that weight was mine since Ryan got his shipment a year ago now. But he had some guitars in there to balance out my incurable need to travel with my favorite books. And as my brilliant husband pointed out, books are made of paper, which is made from trees, so books are technically wood. No wonder they are so heavy! A few of them have moved with me to Boston, London, New York, back to San Francisco, and now here to Santiago. But most of them have been gathered along the way, as I acquired new favorites (anything by, to name a few, Lorrie Moore, Ian McEwan, Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, Eric Puchner, Amanda Davis, Michael Cunningham, Charles Baxter, Lauren Slater, Nicole Krauss, Julie Orringer, Cornelia Nixon, and now Jennifer Egan) as well as more published insights about screenwriting, the craft of fiction, writing exercises, interviews with writers (nothing beats the Paris Review anthologies), teaching creative writing, and now teaching the English language. Because I won’t be getting a job down here until I’m TEFL certified, I wasn’t sure exactly what I would need, true. But I also need these books simply for their presence. If you can believe it, I was discriminating–the vast majority remain at my mom’s house, where she generously built some new bookshelves simply to house them while I’m down here near the bottom of the Earth.

But all these books mean even more to me because they are lined up next to my writing table, which has anchored me to NY and SF so far. It is the one piece of furniture I didn’t post on craigslist or give away or leave on the sidewalk. I could have found a way to merge it into my mom’s garage and bought a DIY version from Home Center (the locals call it Homey; it’s similar to IKEA), but where would the sense of “home” really be in that? I simply couldn’t compromise. All of its 150 pounds had to come with me.

 

And here it is! It arrived yesterday, along with my very first set of big girl pots and pans, which can still go head-to-head with what we have going on down here. We also have a few choice kitchen accoutrements (the Supreme Green Lime Squeezer, for example), gifts from family, picture frames, three boxes of books (okay, five, but two of them were small :), select pieces of art (though our walls are made out of wallpaper laid over concrete, so not sure how exactly we’re going to hang anything), and finally, wrapped in butcher paper, five legs out, my writing table. After I put some soaked beans in a pot that finally won’t boil over, it was the first thing I set up, after giving it a little love and tapping it on the back for making this long journey with me. I guess it’s how some people feel about their car or their bike or their horse or whatever it is that gets them where they need to go. That’s how I feel about this desk, and I trust it will get me there… as I finish my novel, as I prepare for employment, as I gaze at my storyboard’s collection of photos and notecards and general inspiration.

They may have said: “You want to take your desk? It’s six feet long? I’m not sure about that.” But thanks to a couch box and some well-intentioned pleading, it made it. And after two weeks, I finally feel like I have, too.

Now, back to those beans.