The culmination of the triad was conceived 2 years ago, and the plan naturally included an extended farewell to the east coast, including the last trip to Maine; the last Red Sox game; the last May Morning party; the last NYC outing, including the Metropolitan Opera; and a host of BSO dates in both Boston and Tanglewood. The plan was not perfectly executed–we have never been to Nantucket, and we did not have a final visit to the Gardner Museum (closed for a private event the day we tried).

The centerpiece activity is–will be–the Traditional Music and Dance week at Pinewoods Camp August 27 to September 2. In our pre-progeny days we went every year for at least one week. Adult-only (there are family sessions) weeks at PC are a blast, with nearly 24-7 workshops, jams, singalongs, social dances, presentations, parties, and more parties in a tranquil, woodland setting. Or you can choose to swim, boat, read, sleep, practice, whatever appeals. Cars stay parked the entire time. Someone else cooks (though campers do have minor chores). Lodging includes walls, beds, and plumbing.

We chose our session on its merits, without considering what an inauspicious time the last week of August is for closing real estate deals. Making choices out of context leads to unintended consequences, in our case, a nomadic period. The east coast house is sold, and the west coast condo is purchased, but we can’t move yet because we are waiting to go to Pinewoods.

As nomads, we are trying to live lightly in our host homes, to bring as many of our own supplies as we can, to eat out, to work at the office or in the library. The hardest part is to manage without the items that one simply has in one’s home, items we are reluctant to cadge. Now I notice when I need a bandage, a Post-it, a cheese grater, a scanner, a tissue, a sharp knife, a Sharpie, a sun hat, a battery, salt, a postage stamp, a bookmark, matches, a backscratcher, dress shoes, an umbrella, a screwdriver, a picnic blanket, a myriad of items one rarely thinks about because one always has them at hand.

We did not manage to pack all of these items.

A home, I now realize, is a vast repository, sort of a personal Amazon-like mini-warehouse.

Moving day was a day to think about mental models and expertise.

My husband and I were both hopeful about fitting our remaining worldly goods into a shell-type moving container. After all, we had disencumbered ourselves of a dining room, 3 bedrooms, most of the basement, half of the kitchen. We had filled bags and boxes for BBBS pickups, given freely to the local teen and music centers, dutifully lugged our excess construction supplies to Habitat Restore, become near-daily posters on Freecycle, and maintained a giveaway table on our front lawn for weeks. We felt significantly lightened. Being engineers, we even computed our total cubic feet: close to, but under, the limit.

Initially our movers were optimistic as well, but as the done-by time approached with significant remaining work and drastically decreasing space,  needling presentiments of doom poked into my head. Boxes can be shipped, but the furniture simply had to go into the shell. Yet after almost 3 hours, most of the boxes were in, while easily a third of the furniture, including many larger pieces, lay in wait. My mental model was to put in the must-go items first, then deal with the fallout. Why weren’t my movers doing that?

As it turned out, my mental model was incorrect, based on surmise rather than expertise. Our job was a challenging one, but not impossible, and by the end of the day all the furniture and all but 8 boxes were loaded; even the bicycles got loaded. The correct model for this sort of work, the one the experts have, is to load the big and irregular items alternating with the smaller or more regular items, for fit, for structural integrity, for weight balance, to minimize shifting, for many reasons.

In so many aspects of life, we make judgments or decisions based on incorrect mental models. Our models seem right to us, they are based on what we see as logic, on the information we have, and they make sense. But they are often wrong. Since no one can be an expert on everything, or even on most things, maybe the best we can do is to be open to the idea that our ideas may not be right. That might help us feel less stressed when things aren’t going the way we think they should be, and optimistic that a situation that feels worrisome or threatening will turn out fine.

Meanwhile, more data will available when we find out whether our belongings survive the move.

After 35 years in Boston, 25 of them living in the same house, I am moving to Santa Cruz. I chose this format over more social media, because I think a blog is still the best conveyor of words our current world seems to offer. I am a word person. I cherish the nuance and subtlety, etymology, and even orthography of words. English words. I try to learn other languages, yet I feel I must be missing so much. I can barely see the superficial pattern, not stroke the fabric, not feel the nap, not follow the weave, as I can in English. I know it is all there, in every language, of course it is! The more I learn of a new language, the more I realize I don’t know, and feel I can never know.