As I prepare to sell my home, I have been going through the kids rooms, and the rest of the house.
I have been in this home for over ten years, and in that time, we have collected so many things…things that seemed so important at the time, but which seem almost trivial now… so many plans unfinished. Paint samples and furniture catalogs have been collected, but so few projects have been completed. The remnants just create collections of jigsaw puzzle pieces of my images that I hoped to create. I could see the images clearly in my mind, but they never came to be. I lived for years with pieces of other people’s lives… the couch no longer needed, the dining room table tossed aside by my neighbor to the curb, along with her ex husband’s suitcases.
Keep, toss, keep, toss, keep toss… I have said those words so many times in these past few weeks. Hoping to scale down in space, so many things that seemed to important are just collecting dust now. I sort and pick through the piles, but I end up knowing that I will take with me all the memories and the pain that has grown and festered in this house. It seems so easy to throw some things away. It is amazing how little is important to me these days. I no longer need the latest fashions; as long as my hair and make up are done, a pair of Levi’s and boots will do just fine. And those old pieces of furniture will stay too. Maybe there was no room in them for new dreams. Maybe they were so full of the dreams that belonged to the people who cast them aside, that my dreams never stood a chance.
I hope to take with me the beautiful memories…. the birth of a child, puppies, learning to drive, but to leave the painful ones to slip away with the ghosts of former families who shared this space. But I know that the mind doesn’t work that way; it cannot pick and choose what it keeps. The mind is an every growing file cabinet that sorts experiences in some archaic Dewey-decimal system. We can borrow the memories, both bad and good, as they snap into short-term memory, only to be returned as if by magic, to tease and taunt on another day.
I can only hope for the best as I pick up our wrapped and sorted belongings and start again to begin yet again.
Leave a Reply