What Fits in Storage
There are movers in the house right now, wrapping the last of it and carrying it out to a truck headed for storage. I’ve been sitting on the floor of what used to be my studio, watching stacks of boxes go by, and thinking about how much a person accumulates without ever deciding to.
Moving into a much smaller space has a way of asking a blunt question: what do you actually need to be comfortable? Not want. Need. Turns out the list is shorter than I would have guessed a year ago. A chair that works. Good light. Someone to walk with in the evening. That’s most of it.
The movers keep asking me where things go, and half the time I don’t fully know yet — which boxes are staying in storage for a year and which ones need to come with me to the new space right away. It’s an oddly clarifying kind of decision-making, standing in a room deciding in real time what’s actually essential to the way I work.
It’s been record-breaking hot here this week, the kind of heat that makes small comforts feel enormous — an air conditioner that works, a cold drink, walking the neighborhood after dinner with my husband once the sun’s low enough to be kind again. I don’t think I’ve appreciated ordinary comfort this much in years.
I’ve moved plenty of times. This is the first one I’ve actually been sad about. I love this house. I love the morning light that comes through the studio windows just after sunrise, low and gold, before the rest of the day uses it up. I love that deer walk right up to those windows some mornings and look in like they’re checking on us. I’m going to miss all of it in a specific way I wasn’t expecting.
I know this move is toward something — a version of the studio and the work that’s supposed to be bigger and better eventually. I believe that. But knowing a thing and feeling settled about it are different states, and right now I’m somewhere between them. There’s real discomfort in not knowing exactly what the next months look like, and a quieter discomfort in wondering whether I can stretch the work the way I want to without the room I’ve gotten used to having.
The July study is a heron mid-flight — loose brushwork, more color than I usually let myself use, not quite landed. It’s been sitting on the table through all of this, the one piece that isn’t going in a box.
If you’re on Instagram you’ll probably catch pieces of this move as it happens — boxes in the background of whatever I manage to photograph. And whatever the studio looks like by the time it ships. Studies from the Studio subscribers are still getting the heron print this month, working title Mid-Flight. Some things stay on schedule even when nothing else does.
I don’t have a tidy conclusion here. Just boxes, a truck, a house I love, and the particular kind of quiet that comes right before everything gets harder before it gets easier.
Back next week from wherever I land.
— Shelby
