The Excavation Begins
Having moved to five different apartments/houses over the past five years, with two of those moves involving massive off-loadings of possessions, you’d think, by now, we’d be pretty much down to the bare bones of our belongings, with only the most vital and meaningful things remaining. Your thinking would be incorrect.
Now that we have an approximate departure date—it looks like we’ll be leaving around June 15—I’ve begun going through our things with a ruthless eye, trying to whittle a household down to an apartment’s worth of stuff. I’ve done this so many times, yet I still manage to be surprised by things that have, against all odds, stayed with me from NYC to Spain to California (with stints in my parents’ attic). For example, today I found three neat boxes of floppy disks, dating back fifteen years. What, pray tell, should I do with these? What’s on them? I have no idea. And because I have no idea, I can’t throw them away. So I’m going to start a box labeled DO NOT UNPACK, and take that box, at the first opportunity, back to my parents’ attic.
I found datebooks from 2000-2007, the original packaging for my iPod Mini, a selection of check registers dating back to 2001. (I kept the registers; but I’ll probably, ultimately, shred and pitch them.) I found two pairs of eyeglasses—one pair I wore in college—and a point-and-shoot camera I haven’t used since 2005. (The film roll is nearly new; just four pictures have been taken. But of what?) I have a selection of adapters and cords to electronics I may no longer own.
Some of this is easy. But the deeper into the cleaning-out I get, the harder it is, strangely, to keep pitching. Immersed in the (not-so) distant past, things start to take on meaning and weight. This is why I need to do this with someone else, someone who will shame me for considering saving things like ten-year-old check registers and then jolt me into realizing they must, yes, be thrown away.
A house into an apartment. We have ten rooms to go through here, several of which will not have equivalents in NYC. Time to take a deep breath and get started.
Now that we have an approximate departure date—it looks like we’ll be leaving around June 15—I’ve begun going through our things with a ruthless eye, trying to whittle a household down to an apartment’s worth of stuff. I’ve done this so many times, yet I still manage to be surprised by things that have, against all odds, stayed with me from NYC to Spain to California (with stints in my parents’ attic). For example, today I found three neat boxes of floppy disks, dating back fifteen years. What, pray tell, should I do with these? What’s on them? I have no idea. And because I have no idea, I can’t throw them away. So I’m going to start a box labeled DO NOT UNPACK, and take that box, at the first opportunity, back to my parents’ attic.
I found datebooks from 2000-2007, the original packaging for my iPod Mini, a selection of check registers dating back to 2001. (I kept the registers; but I’ll probably, ultimately, shred and pitch them.) I found two pairs of eyeglasses—one pair I wore in college—and a point-and-shoot camera I haven’t used since 2005. (The film roll is nearly new; just four pictures have been taken. But of what?) I have a selection of adapters and cords to electronics I may no longer own.
Some of this is easy. But the deeper into the cleaning-out I get, the harder it is, strangely, to keep pitching. Immersed in the (not-so) distant past, things start to take on meaning and weight. This is why I need to do this with someone else, someone who will shame me for considering saving things like ten-year-old check registers and then jolt me into realizing they must, yes, be thrown away.
A house into an apartment. We have ten rooms to go through here, several of which will not have equivalents in NYC. Time to take a deep breath and get started.
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