emigrating – Jennifer Peacock-Smith

“Pretend it’s Christmas” they say…

“It’ll be so wonderful seeing your stuff again after five months!” they say….

“Blah blah blah…” they say…

Where do I start? I’ve really and truly tried to be a good girl and to see these boxes through a Christmas filter… but it’s just not working for me.

Yup, all I can see are boxes 📦 boxes 📦 and more boxes 📦… and each one is a complete surprise as to what’s in it (I guess that’s where the Christmas part is supposed to come in! But that’s where the similarities end).

Let me pull out some of my favourites:

1: The dirty bowls and glasses in which I made the packers lunch (five months ago) … crumbs and all… They simply finished eating and wrapped them!

2: The boxes marked “linen” contained cane baskets and silk flowers… without a single piece of linen. The linen was found in the end, not a single sheet marked on the box, and no more than two items together. It has appeared in dribs and drabs over the last ten days. We’ve had to borrow bedding from Molly to sleep at night.

3: The silk flowers were removed from their safe vase. The vase was packed in one box, the flowers in another, and the oasis in a third … crushed of course, into sticky green crumbs which now appear everywhere. Did they breed in there?

The dread of each box, however, has produced some pleasant surprises:

Five boxes of lamp shades? I was sure I don’t own that many lamp shades. The first box contained six… the rest each held a single shade. Whew! One becomes so thankful for such pathetically small blessings! I think I’d be thrilled to find a box empty.

We are now almost at sea level, and we’ve come from Joburg which is five thousand feet above sea level. Things in bags that were sealed are now vacuum packed! 🤣

We have a kitchen, we’ve been sleeping in our own bed for two nights now, and it’s starting to feel just a little bit like home 😊

Oh, and we live on a busy street without much of a view. There isn’t usually a lot of green in Malta which is basically one huge rock. The front balcony is too small to swing a cat, and we need to keep the glass doors shut most of the time. But it turns out that what we can see from the living room, while very cropped, is of one of my favourite trees!

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