We came back to Hemet this year excited about going full-time. After all, we’d been traveling extensively for the past five years…How difficult could it be to just ‘switch over’? Well, I have to say the emotional mechanics of it aren’t as easy as I thought…
I have always been visually oriented. That, I guess, is just a fancy way to say if it moved I photographed it! And if it didn’t, I shot it anyway, in case it decided to move later! The end result was a virtual avalanche of photographs…piles and drawers and shelves and boxes of the moments of my life.
When we began to ‘disassemble’ our belongings to get ready for full timing…this ‘mountain of memories’ was like an insurmountable wall. I began by setting up four boxes…one for us to keep, one for each of our sons and one for my sister. And beside them a huge wastebasket.
Some decisions were easy… My dad in high topped shoes, my mom in a flapper dress, my grandparents on the farm, me holding each new baby in my arms. Rick dressed up in his ‘best bib and tucker’ to take me to a high school dance. Our marriage photos, our sons’ baby pictures. And the special moments, forever engraved on my heart…I could never part with those original photos. But what about the ones that didn’t make it into the four boxes…what to do with those???
What saved my sanity was a scanner. (Along with those four boxes) I literally scanned hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of pictures before they made that final trip to the wastebasket. We made a copy for each son, one for the safe deposit box, (I’ll never have to worry about a fire again) and a copy to carry with us always. But then I bid them good-bye and dropped them into the wastebasket. I never made the mistake of looking in there again or I would have just ‘rescued’ them all over again!
One thing I did that I felt was helpful…I waited several days to dump the wastebasket each time. I thought if something ‘feels like a mistake’, I’ll dig it back out…but it never happened. What’s left for us to keep is in two small boxes…one of family history/ old time photos and one of the ‘rest of our lives’.
Most of us never confront our ‘life memories’ in one great fell swoop. For the most part they remain in unopened drawers! This was like a ‘near death experience’…my life passed before my eyes! And it was a sad, joyous, exhilarating and exhausting ride! Nothing remains that will be as hard or as rewarding…The rest is ‘stuff’.
These two boxes…the pared down ‘essence’ of our lives…dear beyond belief.