True to the promise I made to myself earlier, I’ve been setting aside time each week to organize and pack for our move. And delving into the contents of sadly neglected shelves has made me realize that I’ve been holding on to some of my possessions for WAY TOO LONG.
Buried in dusty corners, I haven’t seen some of these things in years. Others have been ever-present and continually overlooked, fading into the background. With kitchen shelves emptied, our long-forgotten pencil sharpener has suddenly come into focus. We’ve had it there, attached to the wall next to the fridge, since 1983. If you had asked me if we had one, I might have said no.
Last week I recycled twenty years of Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and Martha Stewart Living magazines. It was a fun ride with them during that time, and I learned a lot, but these days I do my best NOT to cook, and besides, recipes are easily retrieved from the internet. The mailing label on one of my Bon Appetit’s revealed our old Somerville address, the one we had before this one, and we’ve been here for forty years!
Googling I found EverPresent, a local digital conversion store. With our video tape player no longer, I had them translate and transfer the contents of eight tapes to a thumb drive. It was worth the cost to reclaim the visual record of Juliet’s high school graduation, especially with Marlene in the audience.
Once done, I mailed these with three boxes of additional outdated stuff to GreenDisk, a tech recycling company – cd’s, video tapes, ipod chargers...
The not-yet-obsolete dvd’s I delivered quickly to our local library in the hopes of extending their usability to what will likely be only a moment or so more. Or maybe it just seems that way.
The Knitting Connection received 3 bags of my yarn, single skeins and partial ones – a donation suitable for hats and mittens, to be made by loving hands. The company contact met me in Medford for the hand off.
I dropped a thousand pounds of books (no, really) into the collection bin standing in an isolated corner of Walgreen’s parking lot. We kept the art books, photography and design. For the last few years I’ve been listening instead, to audiobooks downloaded to my phone – and by now, I might add, with newfound appreciation of their non-existent physical storage requirement.
Doug’s enjoying our now-empty shelves too.
There’ll be more to come, but I’m making good progress. The monumental task of packing that kept me up at night has morphed into a surprisingly energizing, multi-stage event, that has me walking a little bit off the ground these days. It’s a head-clearing experience that I’d heartedly recommend for my compadres, especially those over a certain age with decades of stuff underfoot, like me.
I can see clearly now the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Okay, maybe the song overstates the effect, but to mark the occasion and my new frame of mind, watch for Sunshiny Day, my next knit design, to be published soon.
Sunshiny Day – my latest knit design, published 9/7/2022.