Are we there yet? We had moved into our new home. On sunny days it was flooded with light that filled me with unexpected pleasure. There were concerts in the park across from our condo. We had begun to get to know people in our building often with truly serendipitous connections to other friends of ours. We were both pleased with our new home. But we weren't done yet! We still had an old house to empty and sell. So how do you get rid of things? I had taken clothes to Goodwill and periodically thinned out papers, but I realized that I was skimming the surface in my elimination of things. Now we had to get serious.
I began with the seemingly easier things, sending 100 novels off to a senior living facility. But my books were my history, my first glimmer of that obstacle in discarding. I found I could more easily emotionally part with books if I listed them out first. That system quickly broke down as the numbers overwhelmed me. I discovered boxes of books from my parents' home that I wanted to keep and had already culled from their collection almost ten years earlier. As I’ve read electronically for years, I prioritized what I would keep in physical form, giving priority to art, history and reference books along with the few novels that felt especially important to me. And of course two shelves of cookbooks.
We both faced dilemmas with things from our parents that we had forgotten about. My father had a large stamp collection that I had sold upon his death, but several boxes surfaced after my mother passed away and landed in our home. Fortunately, they were easily disposed of at a stamp and coin dealer. Unbeknownst to me, my husband had stored fifteen boxes from his late mother's home for the past twenty years. From old china to family history documents, he now had to sort between what to dispose of and what to keep.
You know those bags you get at conferences? We had a ridiculous number of them and were delighted to learn that we could dispose of them at an office supply store as well as old electronics. A scrap metal dealer took anything that was primarily metal allowing us to eliminate those items that had languished in our garage. I reached out to consignment shops and to antique dealers while my husband mastered Facebook Marketplace. Gradually the piles lessened with odds and ends remaining. We then painted and re-carpeted, preparing the home for its future owners.
Despite our best efforts to eliminate belongings, there were items that followed us to our new home.The part that I struggled with was what to do with my own personal history, the pivotal points in my life documented in journals and letters. There was correspondence from old friends and roommates as we shared the travails of our twenties and beyond. I also had rough drafts that I’d kept of my end of the correspondence, documenting my life in real time. I had forgotten how much we communicated in letters prior to email.
And what does one do with old love letters that represent periods of my life frozen in amber? As a test, I actually shredded letters from one early beau whose letters did not inspire retention. The shredder died. I wondered if the universe was sending me a message and if so, what exactly was it trying to tell me.
I assembled a box of documents of the important turning points in my life, choices that played a role in my personal journey, a roadmap of sorts. I am at this odd place in time where I can see the patterns in my life and what led to the me of today. When we are simply living our life, we don’t always recognize the full significance of those choices until hindsight deepens understanding, allowing us to find our path through our history, connecting the dots. When I do genealogy presentations, I often retrace my steps through a case to understand my intuitive process. I then use that material as a teaching tool. Similarly, my artwork emerges out of an intuitive process, but I then go back and make sense of where it took me to find the story within it. In many ways, my interest in my own personal history is a similar exploration.
Why does this documentation of a life matter? Perhaps I would revisit it to write some essays. Would I be wishing I had that original source material? But if not for me, would anyone else care? I was already imagining my nieces or step-daughters going through it someday. Would they simply pitch it, understandably overwhelmed with the disposal process. Or perhaps they would do as I did with my father’s correspondence, pause to read it and arrive at a deeper understanding of the person they thought they knew. Would they be at all surprised?
I recall an old friend who in his 40s never kept anything personal in writing, no journals, no correspondence, and certainly no love letters. I was quite incredulous when he told me of this practice, knowing I could never implement such a rule in my own life. Now, I understand the wisdom in his approach, but for me history matters –– family history, cultural history and my history. This is where I am stuck as the boxes accumulate in my office. Of all of the stages of moving, this is what stumps me. I want to keep it all.
Often things I’ve held on to for years can be repurposed in artwork. Of all the seemingly odd things I have held onto is a box of leaves, waxed leaves, leaves from 1975 with the newspaper article on how to preserve them. It was a project I had undertaken with my former-husband. I spread them out on a piece of paper and noted the interesting patterns they formed. I often paint about memory and what better material than 50-year-old leaves. A seemingly ephemeral thing which should have turned to mulch years ago.
We are nearing the end of the parts of this process that require our active engagement. It has been a multi-step process from considering what we wanted, to finding what was there, to making a decision, to making it our own, to letting go of belongings. I liked the making it our own stage the best. And the least –– letting things go. The process of emptying out a house of almost thirty years and unearthing my history was daunting, even more so deciding what to do with it.
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| Look how empty! |
There is a learning curve to moving and we don't do it often enough to master it. And there are a multitude of decisions to make along the way. It is a stressful project, more so later in life when belongings have meaning within them, laden with the loss of loved ones and the story of one's own life. I am glad we made the jump now. If we waited ten years, it would not have happened.
And I am grateful to have taken it on with my husband who has a variety of skills that made it more manageable. And now, I look forward to resuming the activities that I enjoy, so much of which has been on hold. Writing about the experience has reminded me of how much I enjoy and have missed writing. I hope to be doing it more in the future.
And a little extra . . .
As we went through this process, many friends confessed that they were thinking of.a move too, but hadn't progressed much further than beginning to thin out belongings. We discovered businesses that support those efforts and tapped a number of them. So we thought we'd provide some of the places we discovered as we went through that process for those of you who are contemplating the same. Some are local for the Minnesota crowd, but check the nationwide stores in your area to see if they provide the same there.
Home Depot Garden Department recycles Plastic pots (they don’t have to be clean)
H&M (Ridgedale) recycles worn out clothing and textiles including bed linens and they give you a coupon for 15% off. For more information
Levis Store (Mall of America) Has a trade in program for old Levis jeans. They’ll pay for some that are salvageable and recycle those that aren’t. There’s a limit of 5 items per month. For more information
Express Metals in Hopkins pays for scrape metal including things with motors, wires, screws and nails pretty much anything with a metal component. https://www.expressmetals.net/
Turnstyle is a good option for consignment. Stop by to check out one of their shops to get a feel for what they might carry. It took awhile to get the hang of it, but it did turn things we forgot we had into cash.
Staples takes those old conference bags along with electronics and gives you a 10% gift certificate for the store.
If you have something that might fall into the antique category check out local antique dealers. Often there are several in one building and they are not all there at the same time. I set up a site online with photos so they could check it out and let me know if something interested them.
And of course all the usual places, Goodwill, Facebook Marketplace, and putting things at the end of the driveway with a free sign.
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