I can’t decide if this is a bump in the road or a horror story

I brought home a grand total of 4 suitcases and 3 boxes. I mailed the boxes from Germany to my new house; two of the suitcases I brought home with me as I flew to Minneapolis this week, and the other two I cleverly brought with me to Chicago when I came home for my job interview last month, and mailed them to my dad’s house. They arrived, and he carried them downstairs into the spare bedroom to await my arrival. For four weeks they sat there...

...and then when I unpacked them yesterday, what greeted me was not the welcome sight of some of my favorite possessions, but an overpowering smell of mold and mildew and generalized disgusting decay. Apparently the lovely and competent pony express had given my suitcases a bath before they got to my dad’s house, and failed to note this fact. And my favorite stuff got ruined. My mom and I salvaged about half of the stuff in the two suitcases with lots of bleach and laundry soap and hot water, but the rest of it, including the suitcase and my backwoods backpack, had to be tossed. Some of it still had the tags on it. My German hardcover books, expensive to begin with and basically irreplaceable from this side of the ocean, were among the stuff we 86ed. I lost four pairs of winter shoes. As far as I can remember, that’s all of them.

I have no idea if I would have been able to handle this in a normal state, but it certainly didn’t go so swell for me yesterday. My stomach turned over several times when I had to stick my hand way down into the festering pile of smoldering oldies and pull out my green-veined shirts and shoes and books, and I just lost it and sat on the bed and bawled.

I did a horrible, awful, irresponsible thing and didn’t buy insurance for my packages. I won’t make that mistake twice. Ugh.

But it’s not all bad here. In fact, 99% of the time, when I’m not losing it over losing my possessions, life is refreshingly normal here. It’s so weird to be surrounded by so many people who know me and care about my welfare. My community has been so insular for so long that it seems so weird to realize that there are multiple people who are willing to help me with things – little things and big ones. “Buying a car” hasn’t meant answering every single question by myself, but basically choosing which person to defer to. Packing up all of my stuff from three different houses hasn’t meant lonely drudgery, but constant companionship. My three parents are driving down with me to help unpack and organize. And my living situation is excited for me. Yay.