Preserving Memories

Yesterday my daughter, Emmie, and I went around the house and took pictures of each room. 

My fiction bookshelf - how I'll miss my books! Note the small framed postcard on the wall:
Van Gogh's "Still Life with Bible".

I try to do this with each place I have ever lived in.  Sometimes I am fanatical about trying to preserve the past.  I have a faulty memory and like to look back and reminisce.  The other day I looked at old photos of my dorm room where I did my graduate studies.  It was fun to see how I've changed as well as how I've stayed the same.


My dorm room, circa 2004.  See the postcard there?

We can only bring the necessities with to my in-laws' house.  The rest is going in storage.  Ever since we made the decision to make this move, I have been saying goodbye to my material possessions and all that they represent:

"Goodbye, pots and pans.  It was nice that we received you for a wedding present.  I really loved cooking dinner together with my husband in our kitchen with you.  I hope that I can use you again real soon."

Or, "Goodbye, leather recliner we saved up to buy not too long ago so I could sit and breastfeed the baby.  You are really comfy.  But it was also cool that I could whip my boobs out in any room of the house when the baby needed to be fed."  It's not going to be the same with the in-laws, no matter how well we get along!

Material possessions are just things.  And you know you don't need things to make you happy.  Good company and a roof over your head goes a long way.  You can't say, though, that the things you call your own aren't a part of you.  Losing them, or putting them away even temporarily, makes you realize the memories and meanings that are woven into them.  So, I'll save these pics on my laptop, which is coming with, and I can always remember.  At least until the day we unpack the pans to cook in our new house.