The movers came yesterday to pack and today they emptied the house. It was very sad to come home and look around the house- everything is in boxes, the shelves empty, artwork off the walls. It echos both auditorily and with the memories of my daughters’ laughter and tears, long nights, lazy days and the smell of coming home to supper in the evening. Now it just smells like cardboard and oven cleaner as Vicki, compulsive person that she is, leaves the house spotless- the way she would like it to be if she were moving in.

This has been a long process in preparation. We began cleaning out our lives over the summer, even before we made the decision to sell the house. Our girls came home for summer visits, and spent a large amount of the time under orders to go through their rooms and storage boxes. The word was, keep what you want, the rest is going! (We did allow them to each save some precious items- stuffed animals, a few items of special clothing, a favorite pillow.) But the rest either went back to school with them, or was up on the block for us to dispose.

Since then Vicki and I have been going through things. Selling the house put a deadline on it. It is exhausting mental work, to sort through all the things and make a million small decisions on each one. Is it worth anything? When was the last time we used it? Keep it? Throw it away? Try to sell it? Give it to someone we know?

So the Nordic track and lawnmower went to two Residents- bachelor guys who are sharing a house. My big leather recliner and a TV, VCR & DVD go to a friend of Vicki’s at work. The 1992 Encyclopedia Brittanica, all 28 leather-bound volumes with 8 years of Yearbooks is put on “Freecycle” and goes to a home schooler in Iowa City.
Vicki’s grandmothers collection of 300+ dolls sells on Ebay or is donated to a local museum. And about 40-50 carloads of material end up at local Goodwill over the summer and fall.

What makes it more difficult is the emotional baggage attached to all these things. BBC America had a program called “The Life Laundry” about people who hoard things such as old cassette cases, and clothes that haven’t fit for 20 years. The host helps the hoarder get rid of things- mostly by overcoming the emotional barriers to letting things go.

I think all of us are a little that way. I’ve been going through drawers and file cabinets for months now. My office at work alone, 14 years of accumulations has taken about 20 hours to sift out. Most of the reference articles were easy to discard- they are out of date, and more current articles are instantly available over broadband Internet connection. But I found pictures and poems from college and even a few items I’d stored away in files since High School. At home, my bedside bottom drawer yields at least 12 years of Father’s Day cards- from homemade crayon cards, to the hilarious Dada-esque card Elizabeth sent me last year (an army of Venus de Milo’s fading into the distance on a blanket of fog, caption: “Happy Fathers Day- I don’t understand it either!”.)

And this detritus is not limited to our own lives. Vicki and I get into the trunks in the basement and attic. There are items from her grandparents- including a Croix de Guerre her grandfather earned in World War I that she had never seen before. Railroad pocket watches. Her dad’s toy trains from childhood in the 30s’. We find old family photos of relatives we can’t identify. There are old newspapers, recipes and fashions cut out and put into scrapbooks for obscure reasons. There are trunks containing her late brothers’ effects, stored with us for over 30 years. She has even kept my old love letters to her. All of this has settled into our home, like the skeletons of tiny dead plankton drifting onto the ocean floor.

And now what has meaning or value to us has been packed into storage for a year. The rest has been sifted, sorted, passed on either to people who appreciate it or to the landfill where it exists as physical detritus along with all the other discards from our local community.

And I can’t help but wonder, will my children, or my children’s children be looking at my detritus when they are 50 or 60 years old. Someday, someone will point to my picture and say, “Who was that?”. And yet, there is a feeling of freedom nonetheless. This homelessness feels like a breath of cool air. We are ready to leave the basement, the attic behind, at least for awhile.