Just finished unpacking my house of over twenty years, what a strange experience. We did not live in it for the past ten years so opening the door to the room, where all our belonging were stored, such a long time ago, was literally walking back into the past.
A wall to ceiling boxes taped shut and labeled very hurriedly, and somewhat carelessly, with titles like 'stuff' or' miscellaneous'. This was an enormous task that had to be finished within a month and watered down to only few boxes of real valuables.
What is valuable is not a small question to answer. Is it my daughters' baby clothes that I kept all those years, so small and crumbled and yellowing? Or maybe the boxes and boxes of toys and plush animals, so dear to our hearts at the time. And my books, so many books, collected with much love over the years.
"You don't need the physical evidence of something that you really like" I tell myself firmly in an effort to quiet the voices screaming "no...Don’t throw me!!!"
Pictures, how can I throw away pictures? My old diaries, my kids’ birthday cards to me, their notebooks from first grade, and their drawings from kindergarten. I keep moving the boxes from here to there, piling items in neat little piles and then pulling them out, I even catch myself arranging them back on shelves for the new people. I know I can't take them all, I know I can't leave them either, don't they have a soul, part of my soul?
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