One Reason I Travel

I travel to get away from my stuff. I mean material stuff that requires upkeep, cleaning, sorting, improving, and putting away. It seems that forty percent of my time at home involves walking stuff from one room to another—dirty laundry to the basement and clean laundry back into drawers and closets; books back onto shelves; dishes to the sink or the cabinets; garden implements back to the shed. It fairly traumatizes me to explain in detail the long trail most paper travels in my house. Paper carries so much important information, and it is just so irritating to deal with. You have to read it, understand it, and respond in some way—pay the bill, call the number—and then you have to file the damn thing. Because if you don’t file papers, they have sex with one another and within days there are piles and piles of bastard papers, all over the house.

So, a travel vacation is a way to leave most of that behind. When I travel, I can choose which stuff I want to keep up with—and then leave the rest of it and not think of it at all while I’m away. That bowl that got left on the porch—it is not anywhere in my consciousness when I’m out to dinner in a fresh little town. The papers that remain un-filed and procreating—in my heart they are filed away in a dark place where there’s not enough light to read by. Thus they are unimportant, forgotten.

I used to take too much stuff with me when I traveled. You know—all the back issues of magazines I needed to read, the cards and letters I had yet to answer. I kid you not: I have on more than one occasion thrown all the paper into a grocery sack to read and sort on the passenger side of the car while my husband drove and tried not to engage with a wife intent on bringing all her office stress with her.

I used to haul a laptop everywhere and files of multiple writing projects I might suddenly return to—the novel whose plot problems I could finally diagnose, or the poetry I’d not felt compelled to edit seriously for the past decade.

Back when I was slim and enjoyed wearing clothes, I packed too many things to wear, because who knew what mood I would be in when we walked down by the river or went out to eat or took a tour? A person needed lots of options. Same goes for make-up and things that go with hair, and jewelry.

I’m about to be away from home for ten days. There will be no laptop, no magazines, no letters to answer, no paperwork to sort. Maybe I’ll take a book. I have three pairs of pants and five shirts, a jacket, the pair of shoes I’ll wear on the plane and the other pair of shoes I’ll pack, both pairs meant for walking. I cannot really express how jubilant I am about having so little stuff along. Of course, the journal goes, one I bought just for this trip, and two pens. One necklace bearing three bits of gold: a cross, an Arabic coffeepot, and my wedding ring (my hands swell, so I rarely wear the ring on my finger).

Half the reason I travel is to travel light.