Chapter 2: Pruning to Move
Note: We are moving from the Washington, D.C. area to Phoenix. I’m seeing it as an adventure, but because I am practical, I’m offering notes on what I learned as we go along. They’ll be numbered to make them easy to read. Chapter 1 is dated October 4. Click on the calendar to call it up.
“If it’s been in a box for a year and you haven’t opened it, just throw it out,” my friend said. “If you haven’t needed it or looked for it, you aren’t using it and don’t need it.”
She’s a good organizer, and I need to prune down a lot. A cross-country move is expensive, and we are paying for it ourselves. When your own business covers relocation costs, it comes out of your pocket.
I peek in the boxes anyway. They are already in the “throw out” stack, but I have to see what I haven’t looked for in a year, haven’t missed at all.
My mother’s love letters to my father. My mother’s journals she kept to record my brothers’ baby progress. Black and white photographs, with scalloped edges, of children who are now grandparents. Dogs long gone. Cars made entirely of metal, with chrome bumpers and no power steering. Women wearing aprons. Men wearing nylon shirts, the first “wash ‘n wear.” This was one of the boxes I’d put together when I cleared out my mother’s house after she died four years ago. I’d thrown out two dumpsters worth of pictures of people I didn’t know. I’d kept these out of sentimental reasons. On the top of the box are scrap books from my childhood, two high school annuals, and some baby pictures of my own son.
It’s true, I haven’t touched the box in years. I haven’t missed or looked for any item in the box. But I can’t throw it out. In the minute or so I looked at the contents, an entire life unspooled in front of my eyes. My parent’s life in this country–their struggles, triumphs, disappointments. I’m the continuation of that story line, and if I throw the box away, the memories may never be triggered again.
I’ll throw something else out. Mom’s memories are coming to Phoenix.
–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2007, All rights reserved.
I have a good friend who is an organizer, and most of her ideas are great. But she, too, rarely keeps the memory type things, and I just feel that I need to. Someday, the kids will take away the ones that apply to them, and that will trim it down quite a bit. But in the meantime, I’m keeping the things that spur the memories, too.
shewolfy728
October 7, 2007
There’s a difference between tossing out ’stuff’ you never use or don’t look at and family records and memories. True, you may not look at it often, but the value in weight and feeling is worth more than the box of spices you use every single day. Even tossing family photos of family members you may not recognize is a dangerous thing to suggest to a genealogist like me: by posting a family photograph which was taken c1900 of my husband’s possible great grandparents and assorted relatives, I have been contacted by over two dozen individuals who have filled in all the data gaps and provided relatives we never knew existed as well as confirming the identities of those people AND giving me more photos of previous generations. Four boxes of valuable out-of-print books will go bye-bye before a single family photo or letter or will gets tossed. Getting rid of your roots, the record of your family’s struggles and triumphs is simply not an acceptable way to lighten a packing load! The only good suggestion I’ve ever heard along this line is to give the stuff to the next generation’s record-keeper to keep, and to take a photograph of the collection to keep for yourself (or a scan). But there is no substitute to holding the letter your mother wrote to your father during the war when everything was so uncertain and life so precious and fragile.
Jan Bryant
October 17, 2007