My wife and I are moving. Again. It’s a little hobby of ours. I say that half jokingly but seriously we do like to move. Well, more like – we love to sell. It’s our little flip-ourselves-out-of-a-mortgage idea and we’ll see how it pans out but in any case there is not doubt about it – we’re moving in a couple weeks.
The first place we always like to tackle is the garage. It’s the catch-all space in our house and it seems to shape shift with every move we make. With each move we discover a lot of things we have no idea why we’re hanging onto them and other things like old, faded newspaper articles and stuffed animals we’ve had since we were kids that we couldn’t possibly part with. So we sell a lot of stuff and then we go through the ritual of combing through our keepsake bins at an attempt to downsize them a little. We end up keeping most of it and moving it again and again.
I call out to Amanda across the garage and make her look at crafts I made when I was five or six of peanut people with googly eyes and a diorama home for them in an After Eight’s chocolate box. She holds up adorable team photos of herself in hockey gear, holding golden trophies and sporting that so-in-style bowl cut.
We both always get a bit stuck and anxious when it comes to the photograph trunk. So many photographs! They’re mixed up by years, and blended families, and pictures of people who have left this world, and others who have just left our lives. It’s triggering for sure, but it’s also lovely, and precious, and just lost in time; forgotten most days. So these photos remind us. They become the metaphor for our past lives. They are the pictorial portrayal of an absent reality, which remains locked away in time and memory.
I will never groan about moving that stuff for the umpteenth time because as Marie Kondo says, “It sparks joy.”