For the first twenty years we were married, we moved almost once a year, so we got used to packing up all our belongings and rearranging them somewhere else.
This time, though, we're getting rid
of everything we possibly can. We're storing a dozen boxes or so in friends'
garages and attics, and our son has furnished his apartment with bookshelves,
tables and chairs he's grown up with. The cat is flying to New York with one
daughter, and we'll ship a few boxes of comics and DVDs to the other daughter
in Washington, but most of the books, furniture, kitchenware and bric-a-brac
we've surrounded ourselves with will be going back to the Salvation Army from
whence they came.
It's not easy saying goodbye to
belongings we've loved. I've managed to get rid of three boxes of Christmas
decorations, four overflowing boxes of sewing and knitting materials, five
boxes vintage items I've cherished for their beauty and function, and countless
books we've loved for years and years. Boxing Day had new meaning this year.
The process is getting easier as we
get closer to our deadline, though. The sheer volume of belongings to pack
makes us value our precious treasures for what they really are: things that
someone else might be able to use (or, honestly, trash. We've taken far more
trips to the dumpster than I like to think about).
A few more meals, another carload of
boxes to our son's apartment and our friends' garages, several trips to the
Salvation Army, Goodwill, and the Redwood Gospel Mission thrift stores nearby,
and we can give the apartment manager our key. We'll drive our ten-year-old
minivan with some clothes, a little camping gear, and three different kinds of
maps toward Las Vegas and into 2016 where God has (we trust) some amazing
adventures waiting for us.
And at the end of the year, even if
all the boxes we've stored with friends are destroyed, we hope to have stored up treasures in heaven -- where they belong.
-- Mindy
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