The stuff of life

The movers come the day after tomorrow. The house looks like we're testing missiles. The trick is to sort through stuff and get rid of stuff and pack stuff, and still have enough stuff out so the kids can do their stuff--easier said than done. And of course, there's the whole time-consuming task of trying to decide, do I still need this? Will I still use this? And why on earth do I still have this, for goodness sake? And what about the stuff you accumulate, things that are meant to be mementos for specific occasions, with no other function than just that. Plastic thingumies and paper doodads. A menu card, a box of business cards from two jobs ago? I have done the impossible and just tossed it. Trickier are things like old magazines--special fiction issues of the New Yorker. Or those one-off copies given for an article written. Ordinarily, I would clip the article, file it in one of those books with the clear plastic pages, and toss the magazine. But even that task seems too daunting, not when the movers are coming in less than 48 hours. And we haven't even gotten to the clothes. This T-shirt looks horribly tired and ragged at the edges, but it's also so comfy, I can't bear to part with it. What then? I even have a little plastic bag of a few of my children's baby teeth, the ones I managed to keep. And what do you do with half-consumed bottles of moisturiser or hair conditioner in little bottles that we took from hotels...even though niether of us uses conditioner, ever. On the bright side, I did run into notes and old letters. Funny missives from friends, and photographs that never did get put in an album. These go back, higgledy-piggledy into a box I've labelled bits and pieces. Bits and pieces of my life. What is it with us, that we can't seem to organise? That our lives, the very matter that makes up our nitty-gritty... why is it, that it must be encountered in disheveled bits and pieces, odds and ends...and little doohickies we run into in the different corners of our everyday? And when will we learn to streamline and compartmentalise so as to have order? I see other people's houses and I wonder, where is all their stuff? Meanwhile, I run into newspaper clippings of job ads in my prayer book, and old credit card bills in my cookbook--and yet, I'm always looking for something I can't quite find. And there's always stuff enough to fill another box...

I'm taking a deep breath and closing my eyes and tossing a few of these doodads and doohickies...there's always more where that came from...