Saying goodbye to our family home.It’s time for new chapters in our life.
We’re moving this week. I spent most of the summer packing up our life and getting ready for the next chapters.
This fourteenth move is bittersweet.
My husband and I are closing the door on the richness of a family home and moving into a DINK house–you know, double income, no kids.
I suppose this is an easy move for some, but if it’s been laden with minefields for us.
How many bookshelves do you really need to have? I’ve given away 400 books.
Do we need our stereo anymore if we only listen to music on the I-pod or the classical radio station?
Do I really want to haul the UCLA grandfather clock I took from my parents’ home that has never worked?
What do we do with all my father-in-law’s Shakespeare books and rare Elizabethan research paraphernalia now that we won’t have the extra bonus room?
How many containers of Christmas ornaments do we need?
Why can’t the kids take all their stuff with them?
Why don’t we just take a picture and throw it away?
This is not my game. I never even liked to play this game. But look how worn it is. Obviously, it’s important to someone in the family.
What do these things really represent?
The sifting reminds me of when my brothers and I sorted through our parents’ possessions.
We easily tossed things into the requisite piles: keep, pass along, throw away. We agreed on everything.
Until we came to a distorted plastic container in the kitchen.
“Uh, oh.” One brother looked at me out of the corner of his eyes.
Ours never looked this good (Ebay photo)
“What will we do?”
“You take it,” said the other brother.
I laughed. “I live in Hawai’i. I’m not taking this across the ocean.”
“But how can we throw it away?”
It was an old white Tupperware pitcher, the lid long melted away in the dishwasher.
It wobbled and was a little discolored, but we had made Kool-Aid in it throughout our childhood.
We realized we weren’t debating the value of plastic trash, but really, about our memories, our summers, and making a mess in the kitchen.
How could we simply toss out those rich chapters of our childhood?
Three tall adults circled this item, now placed square in the middle of the kitchen.
“We should just throw it away,” the oldest brother said.
I smiled at him. “Go ahead.”
Six feet, five inches slumped.
I pointed at the other brother. “You take it home and give it to your wife. She’ll throw it away without a second thought.”
We laughed.
That’s exactly what happened. My sister-in-law is good in situations like that one.
Who does it belong to, really?
The Solarquest game is not my children. It’s not even their childhood. It’s just one of the many chapters they’ve now long outgrown.
I don’t have any problem throwing it away.
Except, I sent them all a photo and an email this morning: “Speak now or forever hold your peace.”
One of them spoke.
It’ll be moving soon; but not with me!
How do you manage your memories and old toys?
Tweetables:
Possessions are not people; take a photo of the old item and throw it away. Click to Tweet
Three things to do with possessions: keep, toss or give away. Click to Tweet
It’s not a problem I have. Aside from a few books, I don’t have anything from before I was about 40. Childhood was, to put it mildly, not something of which I wanted to be reminded.
But I think that as a general rule, I think it’s important to save some things from the past. They may not be important in and of themselves, but they serve as a line of lights illuminating a path into those lost years, a path which one can more easily tread by the light of context they give.
This begs the question – should we make the past so accessible? Absolutely. The surest way to kill those we have loved is to consign them to a forgotten oblivion, to erase even the trinkets that would call them to mind.
I don’t think anyone is so rich that they can spurn the love that made them what they are.
I would be TERRIBLE at this!
It is so much better that you do this now and give the children the opportunity to have what is special to them while you can enjoy their enthusiasm than to have them have to sort through it all when you are gone.