Some projects like to snowball, and 2011 "spring cleaning" is one of them. Dennis & I have lived at the same address for going on a decade. Before we moved to La Crosse, I was already working here, which left only weekends to help pack up the former house (90 minutes up the river). And by "pack up," I of course mean the process of triaging stuff.
Unfortunately, pulling up stakes for a brand-new career and town is not the best mental mind-set in which to wage the battle against sentimentality and narcissism that is part of the pack-rat's mental make-up. (Plus, when you grow up on the lower rungs of the middle class ladder--as did both Dennis & I--a certain "waste-not-want-not" mentality is baked in.) Thus, too many boxes from the attic or back closet were left with their original tape intact and stuffed into the moving truck unexamined.
Which, in itself, is a form of waste. So I want the record to show my embarrassment at the sheer number of things destined for Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or what-have-you--where they should have been doing other people yeoman's service years ago.
Fortunately, even chagrin has an upside that has nothing to do with the sense of aescetic virtue one can work up from the sight of bare shelf-space. It's rather the knowledge that it's easiest to appreciate our own wealth when we give some of it away. Not--as the adage goes--after we've lost it.
Naturally, "wealth" is not merely a matter of material things--it also encompasses our time, our skills, even kindness to folks we might not feel "deserve" it. Or maybe...just maybe...sending a life-lesson--earned at some personal cost--out to the world in the hope that it can do some good.
