Tuesday, March 8

river running free

you know how I feel.



But what if things get in the way? Life is messy right now, piles and piles of stuff-everywhere. We took on the task of cleaning out my parent's garage to make room for our stuff that was in storage. We're becoming permanent residents (for now) and it only made sense to do this, and I've been putting it off since we moved, and not because I was being lazy, but because I didn't want to deal with deciding what to do with a garage full of very old stuff-their stuff. There's the garage sale pile, the keeping but need to organize pile, the sending away to far away cousins pile, the trash heap, and the build up of sadness that comes to life when you open old boxes of shoes, read old letters, and find weird and funny stuff they kept.

I can probably write for hours about this, but the main thing I came here to say is that buying and keeping stuff is a bad thing- beyond consumerism and waste- I'm talking emotionally horrible. There wasn't any time from when they got cancer to when they died for us to even talk about what they wanted to do with all their stuff, so it feels violating to have to decide what to keep and what to give away. How can I put sentimental value aside? I blindly had to throw alot of things away, and I keep wondering what my nana would really want me to do. This is what the rest of the family did while I was away and now it's my turn to take this on.

This will take several more weekends of back breaking work, lots of crying, but eventually we'll have the space we need for our too much stuff, and our room will really be our room.

All I really want to be doing though is planting and reading in the sun-birds flying how, you know how I feel. I came across this song earlier in the week when my back was still in pain and I felt drained of everything I have and it really did the trick.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

heart nina simone. hope the cleaning process is going ok. i'm sure it is a really emotional endeavor, but i'm sure it's nice to be able to sort through mementos too and remember and relive memories.

mari said...

yup, a necessary sadness when after the moment passes is a special thing to experience.