Everything has a story

I spent much of today boxing things up for storage. I filled twelve boxes with things from our china hutch alone. Logic tells me that now is the time to get rid of things we no longer use or want, so I ponder each thing before I wrap it in newspaper. See that little pickle dish in back of this picture? My father won that little bit of painted china in a bingo game when we lived in Newfoundland in 1952. I know this because my mother wrote its history on the piece of tape on the bottom of the dish in her neat librarian handwriting. How can I possibly let go of an object imbued with so much nostalgia and luck? The fact that we have several other pickle dishes, and that this little pickle dish holds only a few pickles in each of its little compartments, and that it has a tiny chip on one edge, seems to make it that much more special. So I tenderly wrap it in newspaper and nestle it with the good china

Another case in point... this old wicker fishing creel. My dad actually used it when he fished (a reason why some people may feel it should be discarded). For sixteen years it sat on top of our china hutch, holding a bunch of bits and pieces left after my mother’s funeral. Things we just didn’t know what to do with; letters of condolences, a box of broken watches we found in my mom's underwear drawer (some were at one time nice, some belonged to long-gone relatives), my mother’s high school autograph album (I met some of the people who signed it when they were in their eighties). Throwing any of it away would feel like tossing away connections - with the people who wore the watches, with my mother’s childhood. Do I need these little artifacts to help me remember? Will I begin to write little notes on the bottoms of items I have saved? Will I still want to keep them when I unwrap them after all this is over? How can I simplify things if I hang on to them all?

No real answers now. I set some things aside for Goodwill, but most of them go into the boxes, to be stored and then unwrapped, handled, and pondered over at some future time. It is no wonder we have never remodeled before, this job is hard!