Packing

I am abysmal at sorting and packing. What I end up doing is LOOKING, instead of turning into a packing automaton, filling boxes as if I were some assembly-line robot. Maybe it's just that I am too attached to all my stuff. Just this weekend, I read in the Washington Post magazine a first-person article on hoarding. (It was written by the guy who moderated a Creative Non-Fiction workshop I took several years back, so of course I had to read it..) What he was told by the experts was that the hoarder looks at his or her 'stuff' as a second self; that throwing things away diminishes himself.

Well, that may be true, because all my things added together DO comprise a pretty good self all by themselves. If you analyzed the contents of my desks and cupboards and drawers, you'd have a fairly accurate picture of who I am. Frighteningly so. There are dishes. LOTS of dishes. I like dishes; so much so that I have 5 sets of china and a double set of the same ironstone pattern that I bought before we were married. Can I help it that my mother-in-law liked the pattern too? Placemats and napkins and candles. I might have fewer of these if I didn't hate ironing so much. But tablecloths require ironing, as do napkins. So much easier to run out and buy a new set of placemats/ napkins at the Crate and Barrel outlet up Duke Street if we're having company. They tell me the 'bare table' look is becoming fashionable. YES!!!

Another telling observation is that there is almost no item of which I have only one. Good things come in threes around here, or multiples thereof. If one candlestick is good, six is even better. Maybe this reflects my insecurity--the fact that I always need a backup in case something goes wrong. Or maybe it's my aesthetic sense. I like the look of odd numbers of things, but almost all stuff comes in pairs. Whatever. Suffice it to say that my house right now looks like an explosion in a box factory as I inventory my life, drawer by drawer.

We took a dispiriting trip to the storage space yesterday as well. In order to hang all the framed pictures, prints, maps, posters, collages, etc, that we have accumulated, I think we'd need to rent the Louvre. And reading today in the Times about someone's father who owned a farm and a 30 000 book library, I thought, "So???" I've started waking in the night wondering where my daughter's mummified wedding dress will go, and whether there will be enough room for all my Christmas stuff, and what would they do to me if I just shoved all the boxes in storage out into the corridor at the United-Storall and walked away? Perhaps I could do a blind, grab-bag garage sale...tell the movers to deposit all our boxes (except the books, of course) on the brick patio of the new house, throw wide the gates, and sell the sealed boxes for $20 a pop. Cash, and most emphatically, CARRY. Who knows what treasures people could walk off with? And if I haven't unpacked these boxes from the last move (or maybe the one before) I obviously don't need the contents. Even I don't know what secrets they hold.

Retirement plan: Learn to use e-Bay and sell everything.