POST 12 Well I’m takin’ my time, I’m just movin’ on

Although we won’t be moving for another year or so, Barb and I have agreed to tackle one room a week, winnowing down 25 years of accumulation to make next year a little easier. Some rooms, like  our bonus room, should be straightforward. Mostly exercise equipment and luggage. Until we discover the long forgotten,  faded photo album, the B’nai Mitzvah banners (Be Like Mike, Laury’s Jungleland), the remnants of our incredible African photo safari. Neither of us are pack rats, but it is still hard to let these things go. We have lost hours looking through the proofs from out wedding photos, feeling the warmth in the smiles emanating from people like our parents and my sister who shared our happiness but are no longer with us. And yes, I could accept tossing my college yearbook, but not before I flipped pages for half an hour searching in vain for the owner of a Chicago sports team, who according to his bio, was a classmate of mine.

I guess each room will have some secret treasure, mixed in with the items that seemed valuable once, but that we can’t at all remember what we saved for. We will fill lots of big black garbage bags and spend many hours on Thursday nights carrying them to the curb.

In a way, that is what this blog is about. It is 10 days old now, with 500 page views, I enjoy writing and the personal feedback Barb and I have received. But I understand now that the true value will be as a documentation of this time in our lives, this very important transition. Fortunately, the documentation is so ephemeral, just images on a screen, that I don’t think we will have to toss them to the curb when the next downsize comes. Our memories will become part of the cloud.

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Hoping the rain storms have passed you all by!

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