Cleaning house

It's amazing how much junk one accumulates throughout one's life. Here we are, heading to Honduras, needing to move out of our house in one week's time, faced with a household of stuff - stuff we've moved before and would be moving again except for the fact that we would have to pay to store all this stuff. (Am I starting to sound like George Carlin?) I have discovered brand new ways of thinking about all of our stuff. I've been holding onto things that I didn't really like because they're still useful. Old dishes, lamps that don't go with our furniture, damaged dolls. The useful things are getting donated. My friend Nancy came all the way from Portland to help me free some of our stuff to go onto more fruitful lives. We auspiciously burned the worn out dolls on Halloween Day, my grandmother's birthday, thanking them for their time with me. One-armed Raggedy Ann, no-hair Raggedy Ann, the eyeless, one-eared dog. Billy and his blond girlfriend went into the fire together, to be together into eternity, and promptly rolled off the log to opposite sides of the fire. Were they glad to finally be freed from each other?

Along with the junk went the cat. Dan, the vet, came over on the Day of the Dead to put him to sleep. Unfortunately, his injection tumor, the result of his 16 plus years of vaccinations, had swelled up to the size of 2 tennis balls just before our return from our road trip. He was about to enter a time of rapid decline, so this was the time for us to let him go. He's resting next to Julie, his brother who had a long and painful death a few year.

Do we realize that a lot of the stuff that we hold onto is just plain trash? Old papers, set aside to be reviewed and never looked at again. Odds and ends that creep into filing cabinets and drawers. I gave Nancy some magnets to put in the donations box, only to turn around to catch her throwing them away. Perhaps she has the better attitude. Would someone else want my garbage anyway? I'm finding easier and easier to throw stuff in the trash the closer we get to departure - we only have so much storage space and so much time. A matter of hours now, until we need to be out of the house and on the road.

In a way, it's nice to have to divest ourselves of so much accumulation in a short period of time. We're paring our lives down to 2 suitcases and 2 carry-ons. What we have becomes meaningless - what do we really need? The rest is put out to the ether, perhaps to be seen again.