Leaving Home, A Family Story
by Laura Langer
My parents moved out of their home of 30 years this winter. We’ve been a family of movers since the 1940s, so you might think this would be a cut-and-dried process for us. We’d know just how to do this. I’ve even written copy for our website on downsizing, and edited blog entries on how to do it. As it turned out, there was nothing cut-and-dried about it, and for all of us the move seemed endless.
While they were looking for the perfect new residence each of my parents urged the other to start getting rid of things and make decisions about what to move. The discussion over storage was brief: “No more storage. It moves or we get rid of it.” Good advice, but more about that later.
When the new home was chosen piles began to appear — piles for donation, for the dumpster, for sale, and for moving. Just like those HG-TV shows. My father filled the trunk, the backseat and the passenger seat of his car time and time again, and I think he got to know the folks at the donation site pretty well.
Every weekend as my parents prepared for the move and we all helped, I went home and cleaned out something – books I wasn’t going to read again for the Library book sale, old photographs that I never look at and shoes I shouldn’t wear anymore, clothes that are “perfectly good” but that I don’t wear, and so on. The throw-away pile, the donation pile, the bags marked “Check on eBay.” My good intentions were endless. As I write this, the trunk still contains four bags of books, the clothes are hanging on the closet door, and I haven’t looked at eBay. I did throw away the shoes.
There was no pile of “everything else” because you aren’t supposed to have a pile of “everything else,” according to those organizing shows. But, “everything else” at my parents’ house was stuffed into crawl spaces, the laundry room, metal shelving, cabinets, closets, drawers, and the garage. And it never seemed to diminish. According to my father, it was multiplying and dividing. When the movers came, they took everything marked for the new house, and when they left, there was still what looked like half a houseful of belongings. Some days I came into my office to find a grocery bag or a box on my chair – filled with something that my father just couldn’t decide about. I realized that my role was to say, “Sure, I’ll take care of that.”
Before the realtor listed the house, there was the fix-up period, which left the garage looking its best ever but still filled with “stuff,” and the interior spiffed up — and still full of more “stuff.” And, so it came to pass that a truck arrived one day and took away what couldn’t be used for staging and put all of it into, yes, storage. Oops.
So, now finally we’re down to a little furniture that the realtor is using, and a pile of 20-year-old firewood that my brother-in-law is coming to pick up this week. It ought to burn nicely. The new place seems like home, it’s true – because that’s where the people we love are living. And, the memories went with them – along with 10 cartons of photographs I promised I would help my mother organize. Will we ever learn?