Stuff and Sensibility

It was an interesting weekend. First I went to an auction and ended up with books about guns and 2 imposing, wide, leather gun belts, complete with places for bullets. Woo hoo!

Before you fear I have lost my mind - these peculiar items came as part of a boxed lot. What I really wanted in the lot was a pair of 7x35 binoculars with a zoom focus. So for the princely sum of $25 I got them -- plus all the gun stuff. . . plus some odd looks from people wondering what the middle aged woman was going to do with two gun belts. I had a few quick Pancho Villa fantasies, my gunbelts crossing my chest as I galloped off across the mesa shouting "Viva La Revolution!" ..but then I remembered I can't ride a horse, and the fantasy evaporated.

The next two days had part of each of them devoted to sorting through my Mom's antiques. My childhood friend Sandy and I managed to assemble a pretty nifty system for doing it, and before I knew it we were busily unpacking, cataloguing and repacking everything based on whether it was "To Auction", "To Move" or "EBAY". I ran across lots of items that had an emotional componant to them -- some things that I had always loved -- and although I let myself save a few, happily I was able to say about many special items that dripped with nostalgia, "Gee, I always liked that -- it brings back some good memories. Put it in the auction box, please." I believe I am more ready to move on than I knew. It took me until to today to get the implication of the fact that I named one category "To Move" - NOT "To Keep" or "To Save", but "To Move"!!

In 4 hours on Saturday and 3 hours on Sunday we went through about 30 boxes of "stuff" - with many more left over. But, that is a very respectable dent to have all decided on, with every box of those 30 now labled and catalogued. Every item is familiar to me, and most of them have some anecdote attached. So literally each item had a decision attached to it. There are very few "To Move" boxes.

Then we made a trip to the cemetary to put some plants on the family grave, in a cemetary that is very picky about allowing plantings. Fortunately I was very clever about the design of the headstone, and it has two large planting wells built into it. Now each well is sporting fabulous yellow lilies as in the picture.

Sunday brought an afternoon with a distant cousin who is in her 80's. She has been very dear to me, and as we are both all alone in the world - family-wise, we have grown closer. She looks forward to our "adventures" whenever I am in town. I pack her up, and we take a ride off in some direction that she hasn't been for a while, doing errands on the way and stopping off for a luncheon where we always argue about who is paying. She is happy and I feel useful, so it is a good thing all around. We talk about the "good old days" and are aware that we are each other's only repository of familial knowledge. Our histories, like our families, interlocked for a long time. Getting together does us both a world of good.

Part of grief, a big part of it, is surrendering the shared-story part of loving someone.

So, parting with objects that have stories attached can be hard. God blessed me this weekend with ease in the parting. Today I am tired as I think my soul is catching up with itself a bit. But I am doing well. In a couple of weeks I will go back for the next round -- and there will be many rounds before I am done.

Dare I feel a bit excited?