In Transition

2016: Strolling with my sister and DH in the Midwest neighborhood where I grew up.

The past several months I've been slowly emptying stuff out of closets, drawers, garage shelves, and cupboards. We've logged 10 years in our current place, but never fully unpacked boxes stacked neatly out of the way from 30 years of togetherness. 

It's surreal to mark three decades since I chucked just about everything I had from my old life and started over at 32. I flew cross-country with two suitcases. Meeting me on the other end a week later was a small truck holding my mattress and a few smaller pieces of furniture and pots and pans that I paid to move. 

Today, the act of pruning belongings and surrendering mementos and stuff is both liberating and emotionally taxing. 

What to Keep and What to Let Go

Diving into boxes of things that once seemed impossible to toss (all those old memories!), today feels less impossible but still requires time to sort and filter. Contained within: file folders of book drafts, correspondence, work triumphs and related 'Atta Girls'  and ticket stubs, souveniors. They fit along a strange continuum of oddly archaic to sentimentally silly. 

Always, in the back of my mind is a gentle chiding: "PJ, this analog stuff taking up space holds no value to anyone but you," and the more practical voice: "do you really want to pay to move it again or store it in the future?" What if you choose to live in another country? In a smaller place? What if a satellite lands on your head, do you really want to leave this to equally aging siblings or a niece or nephew who will view your various belongings as a burden to unload? Some things have been easier to donate or toss than other things. 

Photo albums, in particular, are heavy in both weight and feelings. I've tested a service that will digitize large albums stuffed with prints from the pre-digital cameras days and smartphones. Deciding which prints are the most deserving of digital preservation is equally time-consuming. 

Also driving me: As I'm one week from turning 63, I'm more aware than ever that strength, good health and mobility -- abstract things I once took for granted -- can disappear overnight. I've witnessed friends near and far (including many who've reconnected here) face tremendous setbacks and uncertain medical outlooks. This, too, has lit a fire under me to not put off until tomorrow what I can do today.

Looming in the background that thing : with no direct descendants, there is no daughter or son I can rely on or press to step in and figure it out for me. I am just that eldest responsible daughter, though, who is expected to do all of the above and more for my mother.

In just a few days, my dh and I will be on a five hour plane ride back to my 86-1/2 year old mother's house of 54 years. In it, is my childhood bedroom, which I joyfully painted hot pink when I was 10 years old -- the place I once whiled away hours writing in my diary or reading Jane Austen or contemplating how I'd survive adolescence. 

That bedroom is now a different shade. The closet today is stuffed with my mother's older clothes and various belongings -- along with three other bedrooms and a large basement chock full of  failing cardboard boxes and bins with various assorted stuff that should have been sorted years ago when she and my now deceased father could still manage steep stairs. (Sound familiar, Loribeth?)

A section of my parent's basement -- the part not filled with boxes amassed over 54 years

Where Past and Present Collide

The anti-inflammatory medications for my hyper-reactive immune system seem to be doing the job after months of waiting and wondering when I could reliably walk without pain and swelling or do some light gardening and house maintenance, which are among the items on my mother's to-do list for me. 

In addition to the clothing that can accommodate humid, hot summer days, I'm also packing my emergency medicine, compression socks, and mask in case the plane is full of coughing passengers, or the 30,000 foot elevation swells up my legs and ankles again. Fingers crossed, I'll be adequately fit for what awaits. 

The nearly three-week visit (which I planned for my lungs and sinuses to avoid the worst of the annual pine pollen bomb swirling in dry Washoe Zephyr winds here in the mountains) will also include time with my sisters, a favorite cousin, and old friends still in the area. I'm mentally preparing myself for the odd dance that occurs when reconciling what was with where I am today. 

All of my recent activity and this pending trip reminds me that we're always in a state of transition. We move from one phase of familiar to the unfamiliar, which then becomes our new normal until we peek around the bend or forge a new path into the unknown and have to reorient again. 

Glad to have this space to sort it out with you. xx