Communing With Our Possessions

(Okay, so I failed at NaBloPoMo ... here's an update anyway)

We're just north of Philly, at the home of my college roommate and her family. They're the "friends who are like family" even though we have biological family in the Washington DC area. About 12 years ago they bought this house, and almost immediately made plans to finish the basement. So Dan made a deal - he'd do the labor, and in return, one area whose ceiling was too low to be made into living space, would be our storage room for the things we didn't want to take with us on the boat. Some special pieces of furniture, grandma's quilt, my grandparents' wedding album. Things we'd want if we moved back ashore; things we acquired when we cleaned out my Dad's house after he died.

Now that I no longer have an office and a professional life, those things also needed to go into storage, certificates and textbooks and the art that cheered me every day at the desk. So we had to get rid of some stuff in our already-full storage to make room. We revisited what we owned and discovered, after 8 years of living on a boat, a large number of things that we discovered we no longer need. Some are parted with with sadness, like our cross-country skis that age and injury has made unlikely we'll be able to use again. Some are things that have been left behind as time (and technology) marches on, like old VHS videotaped movies. Some just has passed its expiration date, like old tax records. There's some "what was I thinking?" stuff, and some that I looked at wistfully and remembered an earlier life. We're doing a great deal of reevaluating and assessing our relationship with things...and a great deal of carrying stuff upstairs to be thrown away or donated. More and more I'm understanding the simple efficiency of this quote from designer William Morris:"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."