Wanting to make one last cup of coffee, this morning I pulled the coffee grinder and porcelain drip filter out of a small cardboard box that was sealed up just yesterday. We’ve sold so much of what we own: the bed, the dresser, the chairs, an old globe, a cello. Each sale is to me as intimate as a kiss. Not a drunken kiss with a stranger in the dark, but a sober kiss with a stranger in broad daylight. I size up the prospective kissee and picture them owning my chair: Who will sit in it? What will they be talking about? Will the chair be in the sunny alcove, next to a table with a bowl of fruit, or will it languish in the den, developing a long-term smoke stain patina, soaking up spilled alcohol and bad television? Or maybe they’re saving up for a breast implant, and they’re just buying to flip.

But once the exchange has occurred, there’s no use in getting sentimental. I will never see this stuff again. And because this week we are blessed with the highest gas prices in the history of the United States, Karl and I will pay $450 in fuel to get to Nashville. That’s about how much we made on all of this stuff. That is, we are burning all the furniture.

Picturing the burning pyre of our old stuff, I start to sense the deep catharsis of a big move. It’s a catharsis that begins to makes up for the distance I’m putting between myself and all the friends I’ve made here. Of course, the degree of freedom that I feel may be inversely proportional to the size of the moving vehicle, and because we’ve rented a 16 foot truck, maybe I haven’t milked it for all it’s worth. What else would I throw on the fire, if I really had to?

But then I remember we are two, so it’s really like two 8 foot trucks: one for Karl’s stuff, one for mine. And an 8 foot truck seems like a reasonable size, if a little big, for one person’s belongings.

It went like this. I waded through everything I own and made two piles: I want to keep that, I don’t want to keep this. “Why don’t I do this every year?” I thought. “There’s not enough room for what I don’t want.” And I had no idea how much stuff I’d accumulated. I didn’t know going into it what would make the cut and what, maybe to my own surprise, would be tossed into the Goodwill pile at the decisive moment.

The Goodwill pile swelled with books and magazines I never read and probably never intended to read. T-shirts I would never wear. Lots of knickknacks. So many things that aren’t durable, don’t fit, aren’t practical, or just aren’t relevant anymore.

Last night we had friends over to help us pack. We invited them into all of our personal belongings, to consider the things we own in a way more closely than we ever do. Dee carefully coiled and taped all of the cables for our electronics, matching them with their counterpart gadgets. Jon filled a box with Wall Street Journal-wrapped mugs and bowls. Lauren packed up books on the environment. And we gave so many things away, even now, after two yard sales. Clothes to the Goodwill. A dozen liquor bottles with an inch or so of liquid left in each. A wooden model sailboat. I thought about how we’ll feel driving away—that moment when we merge onto the interstate and realize that we have everything we own in tow. There will be no home to return to, not right now, not this week. We are plunging into limbo.