1) Well, the pantry is empty at last. OK, almost empty. Just need to move out one large box of papers, a small collection of trophies, an old can of paint, and a couple other things. Progress!
2) All these time capsules to ferret through! And while most of my friends are all like this (and by “help” they mean “mental help”), I can only respond like this*. I have to take this at my own pace, and at my own time. Though with the renovations coming so soon, that pace is quickening.
2a) I’d by lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about going through Mother and Daddy’s house with my sister last year in March, and the unbelievable volume of stuff we went through. That one, warm, gritty Sunday afternoon in the garage and the absolute despair of opening yet another box to find . . . only more letters. You think you’re leaving a record of your life, and really your heirs are going to shovel most of it into the trash. If I save some of this stuff long enough, the children will be able to kindle my funeral pyre with it.
2a.1) If we’d just left everything in that house intact - not thrown out anything, including the plastic supermarket bag full of plastic supermarket bags - it would’ve made a perfect Museum of the American Middle Class. But that was not our assignment.
A fourth-grade creation of Oldest Nephew Who Must Not Be Tagged. I’m afraid the clacking sound it makes isn’t as restful as traditional wind chimes.
3) Some happy discoveries that I’m retaining: a couple bottles of port (!), my college diploma (looking a bit worse for wear), the satchel Mother and Daddy brought me from Rome in 1977, the cowhorn they brought me from Switzerland in 1970, some enormous wall fans (including the one I used for the Ig Nobel Prizes back in 1993 or 1994), the heavily-spangled silk and velvet Indian umbrellas used at the beach parties in 2005-2006, and (among the large, glacial deposits of papers of all kinds), a sweet note from 1996 written on the back of a business card of a sweet beau who became a dear friend. It has a hole punched through it, and clearly came attached to a bouquet.
4) But don’t worry, I am also disposing of things: outdated technology, a broken cutting board, many extra copies of a graduate school magazine project, a 1994 calendar of Japanese prints, two mobiles the children made when they were children, the two-cassette box of La Traviata sung by Anna Moffo that had briefly been stolen by a Corrupt Roommate in the late 1980s back when I lived in Allston, Ghetto to the Stars (and recovered when I spotted it in his room); a ceramic Pierrot wall mask from New Orleans my sister gave me one Christmas in the early 1980s, a bottle of homemade mead, and a rare, nearly evaporated bottle of Chateau LaTecque ‘54, vintage 1999, homemade wine from an alumnus that I would not even use as vinegar in salad dressing. And that’s just the beginning!
5) It’s been an adventure, and that was only a couple of hours!
*Yes, this is a quote from a movie, and yes, I have a movie quote for just about everything. It’s my defense mechanism! :-)