moving stuff

This weekend, my husband and his two sisters have been busy moving stuff out of his dad's house (and to Goodwill, their respective houses or ???) in order to get the house ready to rent in January. In my own way, I have tried to be helpful and my husband thinks I am, so that's good.

But it's been a very different process from the one my sister and I experienced three years ago, moving stuff out of my folk's Green Valley house. Two major characteristics define the differences: one, my folks were neat-niks. According to my mom, and her mother before her, "everthing in its place" was a daily life motto. Probably passed down from their Germanic ancestors, this element also shines, tho less brightly, in my own home, and certainly distinguishes my home office from my husband's. Another defining element is the modesty at which my folks lived. They bought furniture from Montgomery Ward and "good china" was a set from Brussels that Dad bought on his return from WWII. Art work on their walls consisted on a paint-by-number sailboat scene that Dad produced one year as he as fighting depression, sparked, we think now, by WWII PSTD.

In contrast, my husband's parents bought over a dozen dark, brooding original oil paintings from their friend, Gene MacKaben. He studied under the Mexican artist, Orosco, and while I doubt his paintings will ever have major value, the work is unique and deserved the deliberate choosing that was demonstrated in the past three months by my husband's family. Crockery by another local artist also generated weeks of cross-country internet photos and an all-night selection process by my sisters-in-law. (We had inherited a single set of dinnerware from the same artist when my mother-in-law died and didn't need any more, so we were out of that all-nighter).

Today, it gets down to photos, clothes and the big push to squeeze all that my father-in-law thinks he wants into his one bedroom, already cluttered, assisted-living apartment. I will need to stand back and watch a lot of this "sausage-making" home decoration take place and take solace in the established orderliness of my dad's same square footage in his independent-living apartment at the same retirement community.

As I look around our house (and less organized garage), I sort of smile as I try to imagine our son picking and choosing what will stay with him, go to charity, get thrown into the dumpster, etc. He doesn't have siblings to squabble with, but neither will he have them to soften the sorrow with shared memories of better times. Oh, well, we all have our stuff to carry and to let go of.

How are you handling all the stuff you have accumulated in your life?