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Another Great Move-In gears up in Boston soon. Fifteen U-hauls or SUVs on every two-block stretch. I will have no choice while I am stuck in traffic but to watch the parade and think:

It seems that for our first eighteen years we hang things up on our walls or put them on our shelves because they are special, or funny, or inspiring. We collect reminders of who we think we are, or want to be. A fan photo from the White Sox game with your Dad smiles from your bulletin board. A blue ribbon from Gymnastics. A vintage photo of the Dalai Lama on your bedroom ceiling demanding that you think differently. The calendar page from the day your braces came off. Old Barbie stickers. Bubblegum comics. Cookie fortunes. Tattered posters of Jimi Hendrix, or Marilyn Monroe, or Dale Ernhardt Junior. Our shrines. It is all about us.

By the time we’re ready to pack up for the college dorm, a great logistical crisis presents itself when faced with moving the entire Pez or Hello Kitty collection…Simpsons figures…Transformers…plastic dinosaurs…miniature porcelain rabbits. How can I take down the posters without wrecking the corners. I have to take my cool stuff with me because it is who I am. Granted, I am going to a shared room the size of my third grade lunchbox, but my cool stuff is coming along. It will tell people who I am, so I don’t have to until I am ready.

Then soon the next step seems to be a first apartment somewhere, paying way too much money to live in too little space with too many people. Once again, the walls are bare and waiting. Five or six roommates have a lot of cool stuff, and soon the apartment has a jungle-theme in one room and a casino motif in another. Nothing quite matches. It is dirty. Empty pizza boxes. Empty fridge. But it is still all about them.

Then, a most unfortunate thing happens. The next apartment, a step up the ladder, and we start to think about creating impressions. We watch HGTV. Pin inspirations on Pinterest. Read decorating magazines. Paint the walls in grown-up neutral colors like Dune and Lichen. We buy ficus trees. We hang framed photos of sea shells and trees. The beer cans are supplanted by chrome and glass martini sets. We actually buy coffee tables, miniature Eiffel Tower paperweights and leather-handled letter openers. Reproduction French vermouth posters. We shop from chain stores and catalogs. The shrines of individuality morph into woefully alike spaces, carefully arranged. The big jar of bottle caps turns into trendy matchbooks. Everything has become quite tasteful. Beige. Bland. Boring. Blending in. Welcome to Apartment G, for Generic.

Exceptions do exist. One young woman I know has managed to grow graciously into a hip young thing while maintaining her own personal style. True, she owns eight pairs of black pants, and spends way too much on sunglasses and tattoos. But she holds on tenaciously to the value of surrounding herself with meaningful images and objects. Yes, she bought a poster and had it framed. But it’s from the culinary school she went to for pastry making, and when she finished she had all her teachers autograph it with a big fat black magic marker.

There are thirty-two likenesses of Benjamin Franklin arranged under the glass top of her Pier One coffee table, with the adoration of her personal hero further celebrated by a large and lovely kite suspended from the ceiling. Every night her wallet and cell phone get plunked down on a shelf made from a piece of driftwood she found on the beach in North Carolina. Above it hangs a small square collage made from every key she’s ever had. A continuous line of pink index cards, each with a handwritten quote, is neatly tacked around the dining room at chair level, so that anywhere you sit there are words and thoughts ready to provoke conversation. She uses old bandanas for napkins, with no two the same color.

The painting over her mantel of four-and-twenty-blackbirds-baked-in-a-pie was a graduation gift, done by her ten year-old stepbrother. Each room is filled with the things that define her, make her feel happy, safe, fulfilled. It is still all about her, about what she has collected, not just obtained.

Can you say that about what’s in your U-Haul?