It's all Peichun's fault

I am not the sort of person who has a blog. I am not an amateur journalist with breaking news stories, not a poet with profound thoughts and not a college girl with juicy gossip about who did what last night and just what she said to him and then you should have seen the face of whatshisname and... Well, I have a habit of falling off the face of the earth and not letting friends know where I am and why. So Peichun, my former roommate, informed me that I would in fact never become the kind of person who keeps up with her emails; it's a futile quest and I should just keep a blog so friends like her can keep tabs on me. So here I am, submitted to being kept tabs on.
I am currently at home, in Benton Harbor. I am waiting for research clearance from Tanzania, and hopefully I'll be on my way back there in a few weeks. So now I am packing. There's a good chance Michael will sell the house and need to move out while I am gone, so I am packing at least things he is unlikely to use--pasta maker, trifle bowl, volcanic rock mortar and pestle from Mexico, ginormous stock pot for making spaghetti for a crowd. It's a little sad, packing the ginormous pot and all, closing down my kitchen and dining room in a way. I can remember a particular Friday evening, standing in the kitchen and looking in on our crowded dining room with a card table pulled up to the dining table and teenagers spooning obscene amounts of sugar on their rice (that in itself is obscene), fingers greasy with chicken. I remember looking in, warm and tired and headachy, and feeling unbelievably privileged. You know, the kind of feeling that gives birth to cliches about hearts bursting and warm joy.
But it is not all sad, this packing. It's also silly, all this stuff we have. I have a pile of things to get rid of. I carry things to the pile, wedging them into boxes and plastic bags. Michael views this collection as a free yard sale, where he can retrieve great finds and put them in the to-be-packed pile. And so we have our very own in-house recycling program. Sure, he has never in his life used a letter opener, but who gets rid of a perfectly good letter opener?