Losing a Lifetime of Memories

The Boston Globe

We are in our basement playing the "Pretend You Are Moving" game. It's my husband's idea. He read about it online in one of those "Fun and easy ways to organize your life right now" posts that cattle-prod you into action. Putting away the Christmas decorations was his poke in the arm. "We have too much stuff!" he bellowed while shimmying overstuffed boxes into crowded spaces. "There's no place to put anything. We have to start throwing things away."

And so began a mission.

"Ask yourself," he says to me now, weeks later and still inspired, "would you keep this if you had to wrap it, pack it, put it in a truck, unpack it, and find a place for it in a house half this size?" He is holding a dish that has no sentimental value, that matches nothing, that's been living in our basement on a shelf, out of sight for so long I don't even recognize it. And that I absolutely do not need.

"No. Of course not," is the answer he is waiting to hear. And it's the correct answer. But the words stick in my throat. The dish is pretty. It's off-white with a thick swatch of blue around the side and wisps of green at the bottom. Plus, it's a deep dish made specifically for pies. "I could make a deep-dish apple pie," I tell him. "Or a chicken pot pie. You love chicken pot pie!"

These words render my husband of 49 years speechless. I have never made a deep-dish anything in all our years of marriage. I don't like to cook. He knows this. And I know this.

But standing in the basement with this dish's future in my hands, I honestly believe that maybe, someday, I will like to cook and I will need this dish. Or maybe, someday, one of our kids will need it. It's the same with everything — with a drawer full of Simplicity patterns. Old toys. Love-worn dolls. Holiday decorations. Games. Souvenir drink glasses. Do I need them? Do I use them? No. But maybe, someday, someone will.

I pick up a musical Pilgrim. Yes. I have a musical Pilgrim. She's small and she's ceramic and she's perched on a stand that used to rotate and sing "America the Beautiful." But she is immobile and silent now. I say out loud, "I can part with this! It's broken. I'm putting it in the trash." But minutes later I rescue her because I think, she's not really broken. She just doesn't sing anymore. She'd still make a cute Thanksgiving decoration. Maybe one of the grandkids would want her for a school project. Maybe one of them could even fix her.

And this is how it goes. Every time I think I can part with something, maybe sabotages me. Maybe silver plate sugar and creamers will come back in style. Maybe we'll use these porcelain egg cups someday.

Maybe this old chair is treasure, the word maybe a boomerang that brings all the stuff I try to let go right back to me.

"Take a picture of it," my husband says. "If you have trouble parting with something, take a picture. That way you keep the memory."

He read this online, too.

And so we take pictures of trophies our kids earned decades ago. And of a lavabo, a real lavabo a long-ago friend gave us, and of a cradle my father made for infant dolls that would be senior citizens by now.

"Pretend we are moving," my husband keeps telling me as we weed through 49 years of things.

And I think, I don't have to pretend. We are moving, not physically, not yet. But it seems to me as I let go of so much of our past, that we are slowly and inevitably moving on.