Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

I feel funny griping about having to pack out our house and our belongings, and parting with material things, especially after reading my friend Kim's blog posting today about the unthinkable loss of two young brothers--one 15, one 12--from carbon monoxide poisoning while they slept. [Kim's blog is listed on my sidebar: It's called This Blog's Got No Title. The entry is really moving.]

I'm reminded of what the police officer said to us on March 13, the night the tree fell on our house. "People you can't get back. The rest of the stuff you can," he said before he left, the water dripping from his plastic-covered policeman's cap.

Out with the Old
Still, it's hard to have the presence of mind to wade through piles of stuff and throw out big and little pieces of your past. I'm physically tired from Day 1 of the packout--there are about two more days to come, next week. I just want to wash my face and go to sleep. I'll resort to my list format here. Some of the things we tossed, or lost, depending on how you view it:

1. Figgy's baby clothes. Many moms I know pack up clothes and pass them on to a friend or neighbor as soon as their child grows out of them. But because I spent so much time hoping we'd have another baby, I kept them all. At this point, it's not hard to throw them out. When I was yearning to be pregnant again, it would have been. Having our sweet almost baby for over a year helped get it out of our system. But H. and I are both very sentimental. We kept a lot: the plaid-trimmed blue jumper from the first day of pre-K; the little yellow Curious George dress; the pink floral Easter dress; the Easter bonnet; and, especially, the little fuzzy blue hooded fleece L.L. Bean jacket that magically fit Figgy for several years. Sisterhood of the traveling jacket. Is it a coincidence that all of these outfits appear in our favorite family photos? I don't think so. That makes them vivid in our memory. It's not just a fleece jacket, but the fleece jacket Figgy was wearing when H. was holding her on the beach one evening on Cape Cod.

2. Old magazines we wrote for. The stacks of Good Housekeeping Christmas issues in which my first [and so far, only] published short story appeared. [How many copies do I really need?] The ones from the early 90s, so dated now--with cover models like Valerie Harper and Delta Burke and pages of recipes that were much more involved, typefaces that look so old-fashioned now. Today's fonts read clean, fast and uncluttered. The new GH recipes are far more streamlined.

3. Punch & Judy's toys. They got soaking wet when the tarp over the split roof leaked and water got into the basement. Out went the play computers, the toy guitar [sorry, because Moey and her family passed it onto Punch], the button book that Punch loved to play with.

Rescue Mission
The flip side is the panicked parachuting in to retrieve precious things you fear you'll never see again.

Wait! That little framed photo of me holding Figgy, cheek to cheek. It was taken on the day they came to make over our living room for a feature in the magazine. And when Figgy had separation anxiety in kindergarten, she brought that photo in her backpack every day.

Many items rescued were photos. The idea of them being packed in a series of big brown boxes, stored in a ginormous warehouse and then unpacked when we move back into the house months from now is just too far a bridge to span. Let's face it, we might never unearth them again. There are going to be a lot of boxes coming back in!

Other urgent last-minute rescues: Figgy's little sketchbooks, and inspirational things from my office, like the signs and magnets about life and love and believing that my friends gave me. And, especially a simple postcard I had over my desk; we printed it at at my last job. It says:

"I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul."
--Poet William Ernest Henley

Too tired to write more. Must sleep. Good night.