Sorting It All Out...

Part of getting ready to move is sorting through 20 years of things we have kept. 

When we were first married we moved at least once a year. And we never knew what the size of the place we were going to be moving into was, but odds are storage would be at a premium. Because of the constant packing and moving we never accumulated a lot of extras. Those things that you think you either might need in another season, or might want to look at or hand down or whatever. There wasn't room.

Once we started moving into houses and places with storage we kept more things. And once we stayed in one place with no incentive to go look through those cabinets or those garage boxes we ended up with a lot of stuff. Just stuff. 

Now we could just move it all to the new place. We will have a three car garage. One for the car, one for a gym and one for nothing but storage so there will be room. But...

I don't want to move anything we don't really want to keep. 

So we sort. 

Since our child lives in Bend anything we have that would be things we thought we might want to pass down to grandchildren or that they might want to have later in life for nostalgia needs to be sorted during the holidays when family visits are happening.

Today I pulled up two boxes and we started. 

Now, my kid is more like my husband than like me. Not a lot of sentimental attachment to things. I'm not super romantic, or sentimental either, but I have this weird thing that most people who write seem to have where I imbue inanimate objects with a lot of extra stuff. Pretty much everything gets anthropomorphized. Playing with toys as a child was a complete balancing act of what had been played with the most recently so I didn't hurt any feelings by not playing with something two times in a row. 

So as I sort things I see the baby blanket that my grandmother crocheted and it's in the get rid of it pile and I'm like..."Are you sure? That's from your great grandmother."

Which my grandmother died when my kid was a few months old. 

And I didn't really have much of a relationship with her either. 

I mean she told Brent that he should listen to her and leave while he could.

THE NIGHT BEFORE OUR WEDDING!

So yeah, it's not like there is any sort of memory attached to that blanket. Just my feeling that there probably should be?

Then the next things were things that we had kept. Report cards and things from each grade level of school work. All of the award certificates. All of the programs for concerts. Holy cow there were a lot of programs. 

The most favored stuffies. Two blankets that had been loved to pieces. A lot of stuff. Just random stuff. Two big storage boxes worth of stuff.

And what ended up in the save pile was two stuffed animals and a box of coins from Grandpa Jack. 

Everything else was "meh"

This was out of two big storage bins. 

Three things. 

So I looked through things that had been put in to the meh pile and put aside a few things. A few short stories that had been written that amused me. Three different years of "If I Grow Up to Be President I Will..." pages. 

And the rest went into donation, recycling, or the trash. 

Because one of the things that we kept finding is that the memories of a lot of those things were mine. Awards and certificates of achievement for activities that had been forgotten. Lots of academic awards when the thought was "I don't really view doing well in school as an achievement. It was something I could do, something I was expected to do, not something I really worked at." So why did we keep all of those things? I mean I have a few guesses...

Clearly if your child is thriving you are doing a good job right?

If they are getting good grades you are a good parent right?

If they are leveling up in their activities that's a reflection on you right?

Or at least that's what it seems like now. Because I remember all of these things as a parent watching and driving and listening, but my kid doesn't. And maybe at the time those things did mean more, but they just have faded away. I mean, I have no idea what I did as a kid. And I am pretty sure even if I had those sorts of things they would just be in a box in storage.

Like my own baby blankets. Which I put back in the box knowing that in a month or so when I sort it to actually pack it better I will toss them. I just couldn't face it today. Only one set of baby blankets at a time. 

I mean, how sad are they that they are going away? I mean my grandmother crocheted that ugly blanket that I put in the crib even though it didn't match anything else but I mean my grandmother crocheted it so how could I not? 

I should probably go get it back out of the recycle pile...