When moving, especially with someone who isn’t a packrat and to a much smaller space, questions keep coming up: “Do we need to keep this?”  “Why did we keep this?”  “Do we need to keep this?”  My husband spent part of yesterday sawing out carvings from his old guitar because they are memories that matter to him, so I know he gets it.  But at the end of the day, he’ll tuck that under his arm and I’ll be dragging behind him with a wagon full of journals since 1983 and mail since around the same time and also sentimental things my parents saved, not to mention every single photo they ever took and printed out, and a cat, and who knows what else.  So, I recognize the imbalance, and I’m working on it.  I REALLY AM.  Look, I just threw out a bunch of nice things people wrote about Mom because they were scanned and I knew I didn’t need to keep the paper (even though the computer might die one day).  It hurt.  Those things were written for her get-well book, and she never got better.  It is super hard for me to move out of those memories sometimes.  I’m going to throw out my bronzed baby shoes (two pairs for some reason) because I don’t need them and all they mean to me is that my parents kept them.  I don’t want to leave them for someone else to lament tossing when I’m dead.

I would miss Easter lunch if I continued this inventory, but I have been processing in my mind why I keep things, in part because I want to understand it and in part because when there isn’t a good reason, I can let the things go.  One thing that came up yesterday is that I found an email from April 12, 2006, at 13:43:23pm, written from a friend of mine in response to a party I was having.  I’d asked for his sister-in-law’s email address because I wanted to invite her and her husband, and my friend replied, “Since you and [she] are our main babysitters, we’ll have to figure something out.”  Now, the first thing that comes to mind is that I never should have printed an email.  Eventually I just made a folder in my email online of ones I wanted to keep.  And I couldn’t figure out why this one was in my cedar chest with all my journals and notes from my parents until I looked at that date again.  It’s the date my friend’s daughter died.  She was 4 months old and on the day he was writing me that email, wondering who would babysit her so he could come to my party, she died.

Yes.   I could go the rest of my life never remembering this, and if my friends who are the parents of this sweet baby read this blog, I am sorry for reminding them.  But the truth is, we never forget she lived and died.  And reading that email made me so happy to remember another VERY REAL moment when that precious child lived.  When she was someone to plan around, when she was someone I got to babysit.

No.  I won’t continue to print lots of emails.  The truth is, if my email provider crashed and I lost all the emails I saved, I’d never know what I lost.  I’d be sad and I’d know I lost emails with my parents, but I’d have my memories, until they fade.  That’s what happens.  That’s life.  But so long as I have the power to try and preserve, I will.

Consider me a one-woman historian.  I hope I become famous one day so it matters.  I am trying to become an electronic preserver, and I looked into having someone else scan my/my parents’ photos, but it cost too much.  My motivation now is the cost to store this stuff.  It’s not a lot of stuff, in case you were wondering.  It could fit nicely into the apartment’s 4×6″ storage closet for $50/month and probably have room left over.  But I don’t want it to.  So I better set myself some goals, like scanning a box a week or an envelope a day or something.  I do think the things are worth reviewing and some are worth preserving.  The letters my grandmother, great aunt, mother, and mom’s best friend exchanged are priceless to me.  I have so enjoyed reading them and learning about how different things were when their first landline phone was installed, for example, and how that was an expense Grandma didn’t know if she wanted to take on.

But I acknowledge that some of this stuff is causing me stress because it weighs me down.  I told my husband, there’s a reason they call it “trappings”.  It causes me stress because those of you who don’t appreciate the keeping of things look down on it, and I don’t like that.  It causes me stress because my parents started dying in April 2013 and I still haven’t finished getting through it.  Honestly, that’s not a good indicator for success.  But wading through emotional tasks is wading through a pond made of syrup.  It moves slowly.  I stop to relive every damn thing.  That’s both an argument for and against keeping things, in my opinion.  Because I need to be more present, but my past is precious.  And aren’t we always taught to study history?

Thanks for reading.  And happy Easter if that is a part of history you are remembering today.