Boxes

This is the first of six days off. I couldn't me more thrilled. I take that back--I would be more thrilled if I had ten days off in a row. But I will take what I can get, and six is just fine with me.

Right now I'm sitting in my dark living room, curtains drawn (as they always are--we have a wall full of windows in our living room and when the curtains open, our across-the-way neighbors can see straight into our lives). There are piles of boxes all around me and I've tripped over every last one of them. My nerves are starting to wear thin as our big move to San Luis Obispo grows ever closer and our living room becomes progressively more cramped as the boxes grow in number. Our "stuff" has multiplied in the 3 short years we've lived here and I don't see why we can't just throw stuff away.

Terry (my husband) and I are very different when it comes to our living style. He likes to keep everything. He has a memory box for sentimental items (perhaps he doesn't want me telling people about his memory box). I, on the other hand, have been known to throw away family heirlooms. You think I'm kidding? Just talk to anyone who has lived with me or knows me well enough to know that I dream of Martha Stewart-esque closets with hardly anything in them but towels and the lavender used to keep them smelling spring fresh. Hey--towels we need. I take a shower every day. My grandpa's grandfather clock which nobody wanted--well, I figured since no one wanted it, we could just throw it away. When said clock was found in the giant dumpster later that day, my family was infuriated. "Why in the world would you throw this away??? This was grandpa's clock," which was said to me by several different family members. "What were you thinking?? This has been hanging on grandma and grandpa's wall since they moved into this house 30 years ago!!!" 30 years isn't that long. I'm 30 years old. It's not like great-grandma Olvia Lundstrom had brought it over from Sweden in the late 1800's. It was a clock--IN BAD REPAIR, I might add. And no one wanted it. I did what should have been done and chucked it in the dumpster. To make a long story short, the clock that no one wanted--the clock that I had laid to rest in the great dumpster, was quickly rescued from the pit and hung prominently on my aunt and uncle's wall.

Yes. I throw things away. I don't think it's as big a problem as everyone thinks. My mom used to go through my garbage bags as a kid to make sure I wasn't throwing away anything precious. Now Terry goes through my garbage bags. It's not like I'm throwing away gold, people--I'm throwing away chintzy toys (made from plastic, and in China to boot!). We don't have to keep every charger from every phone we've owned for the last 5 years. Terry has 2 keyboards from 2 different desktop computers that are long gone. Why have we kept the keyboards when we will never again own a desktop computer? We have plastic parts in my cupboards that go to who knows what that have been in a similar cupboard since Terry moved to Los Angeles in 2002. So my question is WHY do we have to move those things when they'll just take up space in our drawers and closets in San Luis Obispo??I will never understand this about my husband. As for me, I save letters. That's really the only thing toward which I hold any sentimentality. And I re-read them. I suppose others would think my affinity for the handwritten letter is a little odd and useless.

So as the pile of boxes grows, and as boxes are transferred from the guest room closet to the living room floor, my insides churn just a bit in knowing that If given the opportunity, I could cut down the number of boxes we need to move by HALF. And by the time Terry realized that I'd thrown away his 3-D dinosaur puzzle from Christmas 5 years ago, I could in all honesty say, "What 3-D dinosaur puzzle???" because I would be 80 years old and I would hold no memory of such a thing.

And with that, it's time to load said boxes into my car. There will be mumbling and muttering under my breath as I do so.