This has been one of those quiet, kind of low energy days. I didn’t get a lot accomplished, and I will have to get serious work done tomorrow. I’m glad to have a long weekend as I could use the extra day. I continue to look around me at all the stuff I have to deal with as I prepare to move myself. Most days I look at it and shake my head wondering what on earth I am going to do with all this stuff and how I will decide what to keep and what to offload.
I realize though that I am grateful for my stuff. There are things that are going to be hard to part with–some things that are sentimental, others that are useful but would be impractical to haul someplace else, and still others that I have absolutely no idea why I’ve kept them for as long as I have. There is furniture, like my daughter’s loft bed that stood in her room during high school and that she actually used her last year of college. With her having moved on to graduate school, it is time to dispose of the bed (though she asked me if I would save it for her children…) Then there’s the antique school desk and chair I bought at a flea market over 20 years ago. I lovingly refinished both pieces of furniture and for a number of years one or the other of the kids used it. When I moved to California from Michigan I brought it with me, purely for sentimental reasons, though I did find some use for it for a time. Now, however, it is time for it to go. It makes me a bit sad, but to keep it would be silly and impractical to haul it across the country as I head toward my what’s next.
As I’ve packed over these months I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that I have a lot of stuff that I no longer need. Whenever and wherever I move next I need to lighten the load of things I am moving, and I will. In the interest of saving time I will also likely end up hauling some things that I won’t need and will have to offload them from the next place. I will try to minimize this, but know already that this will be the case. It is a bitter-sweet thing to do. I look at some of the items of all shapes and sizes and know that I need to let them go; but the letting go feels difficult and a bit melancholy. This is when I need to have a ruthless friend with me who will look at my stuff and look at me and say, “Some of this crap has to go.” My friend Pat would be good at that, but as she is all the way in Detroit. I will have to employ Pat-by-proxy allowing her voice to creep in my head and say, “Ter, let it go. You have to get rid of some of this stuff.”
And so I will let it go, with gratitude for all the pleasure I’ve gotten from some of these old books, toys, pieces of furniture, coffee mugs, knick knacks, and other sentimental items that I will either donate and pass along to others who can use them or will recycle them. There will of course be plenty of other things I will keep and bring along with me; things I will have to offload at some point in the future. But I am grateful for the opportunity to lighten my load somewhat as I prepare to move and no doubt somebody is going to be very happy to give my stuff a new home. It’s all good.
