Untitled, Oak and marble, by Todd Michael Tawd.

In 1997, my best friend and I wanted to move away from Denver. We chose a few cities we had never been to before, rolled some dice, and landed on Portland. We haphazardly packed our U-Haul, medicated our cats for the long drive, and drove away with about $500 between us. We have been here ever since.

After nearly 30 years, it’s time to leave one of my favorite places on Earth for another adventure.

This time, I am not 21 years old and free of responsibility. I am 50. I am bringing my children. (And our cats…always with the cats! lol). I can’t just grab a U-Haul and go because there’s literally an ocean between here and Berlin. Bringing physical items is expensive and cumbersome.

As I sort through my house I think of Marie Kondo, except the question for me is not, “Does this bring me joy?” Instead it is, “Do I care about this enough to bring it across an ocean?” Emotional weight is considered. Sometimes there is a clear yes or no. Other times guilt crawls in, or nostalgia overwhelms me. The magic 8 ball has spoken: Maybe. These items I have to put back on the shelf to revisit another time.

And then there are the things that Todd built. My late husband was 6’ 4” and could build anything—and he always built it big. When I first met him, he was building a canoe out of strips of wood. He had gone to Powell’s book store, grabbed a book about building canoes, sat in the coffee shop there and spent the afternoon reading it. He didn’t even buy the book—he just read it and then went home and spent the next several months building the most beautiful canoe you’ve ever seen. Eighteen feet long, three and half feet wide, from strips of wood with slices of geodes inlaid into the bow and the stern.

Later he collected old tables made of oak, and used marble and granite to inlay mosaics into them. Our dining room table was one of these; stunningly gorgeous but weighing hundreds of pounds.

He built my art studio, too, when I was pregnant with our daughter and needed to move my art practice out of the room that would become her bedroom. He could build anything, and he often did. All of these things were supplemented by the things he collected—hundreds of tools, tens of musical instruments and equipment, giant racks of recording equipment, the innards of a piano, cabinets of cords…

I was left with the weight of these things. Filled with his essence, they are his art and his soul, fully charged with all of my complicated feelings for him. Love, of course, admiration for his skill and artistry, anger at him for leaving me to deal with everything he left behind, and a stew of messy feelings for the way he left and the way he lived before he left (perhaps a story for another time).

These things are heavy in every sense of the world. As each one finds a home I find myself overwhelmed by grief as I am forced to let go again and again and again. A friend picked up the canoe and we were talking and joking about how everything Todd did was so big. Suddenly I broke down mid-sentence. Movers came to take the table (to another friend, thankfully), and as soon as they left the house I fell to the floor, sobbing in a way I had not done since the first year after he died.

Then slowly, steadily, the space feels lighter. Empty but not vacant; it feels tidy, open. It feels filled with opportunity and ready to breathe. The space itself seems to become bigger. I remember a little bit how many possibilities it held when we first bought the house. Slowly, steadily, as I let go again and again and again, I begin to feel ready.

Ready to let go.

Ready to begin a new adventure and leave the heavy things behind.

But after I posted, I turned around and was surprised at how much progress I’ve actually made. There’s still a lot of mess and chaos, but I didn’t expect to see so much space actually cleared out. I’ve let go of furniture, packed up books and personal memorabilia, organized several areas, cleared out two large bookshelves. I made a huge donation to SCRAP, a local non-profit that re-sells old art & craft supplies and materials for creative re-use. I have a large bag of trash to take out, another of recycling, and a 3rd for sale or donation. Things gathered together that require errands to take care of.

It can be hard to see our own progress when we are in the messy middle. With cleaning and organizing, the mess often gets worse before it gets better. With neurodivergence, the combination of that chaos and the infinite micro-decisions that must be made to overcome the mess often freezes me in my tracks.

And yet in that moment I saw it: Progress. A lot of progress.

I am learning to acknowledge and even celebrate what I have accomplished even when there’s more to do. This article is that acknowledgement and celebration. I want to cement it in my brain so that I remember to do it more often. And hopefully to remind you to stop and do the same if you need it.

Here is what I turned and saw. I don’t know how it looks to you. Maybe still chaotic. I always forget to take a “before” picture, and this is no exception. It’s the messy middle because it is still messy. But hooray for progress on a project that feels like it will never end:

And finally, a reminder that it WILL, in fact, end, and soon. We will be saying goodbye to this home forever and in search of a new one abroad.

I am in the very messy, extremely stressful middle of packing up my home and my kids and my cats and my art, selling my house, and moving across the world to Germany.

My maternal grandparents were Jewish and had to flee Europe as young teenagers during WWII. As reparations under Germany’s Article 116, my family was able to get dual citizenship with the US and Germany. My adult son and I talked about it for several years, and spent time getting our paperwork together and applying. We wanted to do it just because we could, and we thought it would provide some great opportunities and possibilities for the future. Both of my kids could go to college in the EU for next to nothing. Travel would be easier. And if for any reason we ever wanted to move…

Fast forward to when we got word that our applications for dual citizenship were approved by the German government. The approval came amidst the 2nd term of a certain orange man and Project 2025 in full force, and any guise of democracy quickly unraveling. This combined with the opportunities available for us in the EU and my lifelong desire to travel, a very loud whisper came along with our dual citizenship status, “We could just…GO…”

That whisper quickly became a roar, a pull too strong to ignore. A privilege and an opportunity that I simply could not pass up.

Time is speeding up as the move gets closer. Packing and preparing the house is not just packing and preparing the house. It is endless decisions throughout each day. It is reckoning with objects that are loaded with personal history. It is finding a way to support one child who doesn’t want to go and who is not capable of letting go of belongings. It is contending with ongoing grief of too much personal loss in the past 4 1/2 years. Realizing that this is another loss, not of a person but of a home and a way of life that is comfortable and familiar.

Of course it is also exciting. An adventure and new life await us. Each day my belly fills with anxiety, anticipation, and excitement. Each night my dreams get more chaotic as my mind tries to make sense of it all.

Leaving will be hard. Starting new in a whole other part of the world will be a challenge. A challenge and a dream; I cannot wait to start.