Packing

t’s amazing to me how a house can be so full and yet so empty at the same time. Packing all of your worldly possessions into as many boxes as it takes, you start to realize how much you can accumulate in two and a half years. It doesn’t seem like much, when it’s sitting there. Decorations, paperwork, stacks upon stacks of books. A chest of drawers to organize your papers, dozens of pens, and notebooks. It’s the little things that seem to accumulate the fastest, but when you consider that just two and a half years earlier, we had next to nothing except what we could fit in our car (we had given away a lot, and thrown away what was left to get to Seattle) it’s amazing how fast it all builds up. Even still it never seems like all that much, until you have to prepare to move it somewhere else.

As I looked through my closet I suddenly found myself buried beneath mounds and mounds of clothes, clothes I hadn’t seen for months, perhaps even the entire two years. Had I even worn half of these? Did I still fit into them? What about these shoes? Where have they even been? I’ve been looking for this…so that’s where that went! I could spend hours just finding things I was sure I’d lost, or I’d forgotten I’d even had. I suppose you could call that the more adventurous side of moving. Finding old knick-knacks.

But then the question comes, as it always does, of what to keep. Given the opportunity I would probably prefer to get rid of everything I have, and simply start over in a new place, rather than moving. Call it lazy, but to be honest, if I have to move it (rather than have someone do it for me, as in when you have something delivered) I’d rather just get rid of it. But then, that still requires some amount of moving it still doesn’t it? I guess it’s fortunate then that we’re not moving particularly far.