The Rocking Horse Mug

The hope of a freeway series is fading – instead it looks the World Series will be a matchup between the Phillies and the Devil Incarnate.

By week’s end, I will have turned a year older (gulp), moved into a home I own, seen the devil incarnate play in Anaheim (and game 7 at Chavez Ravine if there is one or homecoming for the Trojans) and my first ever U2 concert. But back to packing, cleaning, sorting organizing, making lists, agonizing over appliances and all of the craziness of moving. I am very grateful for PTOs and having negotiated three weeks of vacation.

I have lived in no fewer than eleven different places with fifteen different people (plus nine months with my parents in my mid-twenties) in the last sixteen years. In that time I have lived in dorms, crappy apartments, townhouses, houses, guest houses, gated communities, and more crappy apartments in four different cities in two different states.

All of that ends Thursday when I move into a home I own.

As the gypsy/bohemian chapter of my life comes to a close, I am grasping to make sense of this wonderful and unexpected turn of a page. Sifting through the unbelievable amount of possessions I have, I came across this rocking horse mug pictured above. I believe he (the rocking horse mug) was given to me at a Christmas party in either 1993 or 1994 having come wrapped in red cellophane and filled with hot chocolate mix. I don’t know how or why he made the cut; with each of the previous moves I certainly purged many, many items as I am doing this time around. Perhaps I kept him all of this time because I so love the friends who gave him (the rocking horse mug) to me who now live five states away. Perhaps it reminds me of childhood and my penchant for rocking and carousel horses. Whatever the case, he (the rocking horse mug) now lives in my new house cleaned and stored with all of his friends, the other coffee mugs of course. He will continue, as he has for the better part of fifteen years, to bear witness to my life.