I'm moving out

Well, technically the boy and I moved into our new home a little over 6 months ago, we just sold our old house. That being said, there was still a lot of old furniture and knick-knacks to get rid of, plus a lot of spring cleaning to do at both the old and new house which needed to be done before the sale. Throw on top of that the fact that his family's mountain house is selling this weekend, and you have a good idea of what the last few days have been for me!


If any of you have moved, you know one of the main problems with moving out of a home is deciding what to keep and what to sell or donate or throw away.

Some of these decisions are easy (i.e. Throw out the old beer which sat out all 4th of July of 2009 and has since been been sitting in the far reaches of the refrigerator).


While others are a bit harder. . .
(Should I keep the chipped Double old fashioned my grandmother gave me, or chuck it? )


(Do I try to make the boy sell all of the photographs, paintings, and other golf memorabilia which lined his walls, or let him keep it in hopes he will keep it contained to a man-cave?)


Slowly these decisions were fretted about, and finally made, and I at last I was feeling really good about everything. . . Then, as scores of people scoured over items the boy and I had deemed unnecessary at our moving sale, I began to feel pangs of remorse. That lamp was his mother's! (Nevermind that it befits the older couple living in a farmhouse who bought it rather than our modern hillside escape) The sculpture of the lighthouse was given to me by my grandmother! (It was also purchased at a moving sale, and it in fact had a chip in it, plus my grandmother was more unloading the piece than giving it as a gift; the older gentleman purchasing it was creating a man-cave of the nautical sort so the lighthouse sculpture would be perfect for his room). As pieces began to be gobbled up by appreciative passers by faster and faster, I suddenly came to terms with it all:

Letting go is part of moving on. These items were not the sum of the people who had given them to us. Their memories were not housed in these imperfect vessels, these were merely projections, half-thruths, artifacts with only a shadow of meaning. Cherished possessions were still in safe keeping, safely packed away in our hearts and moving boxes.