Letting Go

Photo from the future (2015) before another move: what we kept

One of the most difficult tasks of this move is deciding to let go of things we have collected or inherited over the years. Ever since Tom's parents, a great-aunt, and a great-uncle died within four of five years of one another, we have been carting around with us large and small pieces of antique furniture, silverware, dishes, photographs, letters, and ephemera, all reminiscent of a lifestyle Tom has laughingly described as one we can't afford to live. Tom's great-grandfather was a pharmacist, oilman, and land speculator in Houston at the turn of the century. Tom and our children are the ragtag end of that line of Armstrongs who migrated from Virginia to Texas near the end of the nineteenth century, and we carry with us evidence of that uppercrust life.

In the last fifteen years of our marriage, we have purchased homes (or renovated homes) that could contain and showcase the partial remains of several households. Now, however, we are moving from a 3300-square foot house to one that is barely 1300-square feet, and all our belongings will not fit in this house built in 1946, with three small bedrooms and two tiny baths. I am finding it difficult to let go of all the stuff we own.

It's easy to say one wants a simpler, less cluttered life. It's much more difficult to cut the clutter from one's life. To help decide what will go into this smaller house and what items will go into storage until we can sell them, I am mentally going room by room through our former house in Texas to help me visualize our belongings, and I am making a list of all the large or important pieces of furniture, lamps, antiques. I've drawn sort-of-to-scale diagrams of the 1300-square foot house we are planning to purchase, and I'm trying to place within those diagrams the pieces of furniture we really want to keep.

Should we break up the large pieces of Tom's grandmother's diningroom set, keeping only our favorite pieces such as the heavy buffet, dining room table and china cabinet? Where is Mary's travel trunk going to fit, with its contents of family photographs spanning several generations? Where will the lawyer's bookcases go, with their nineteenth century books? Should we sell the grand piano, a Steinway built in 1907, with its cracked sound board? Or should we invest a few thousand dollars to have it repaired and restored to its former glory? Where will we put that huge art-deco desk that was Tom's paternal grandfather's, a grandfather who was a heart surgeon in Houston? Or how about Tom's grandmother's treadle New Home sewing machine? Or those heavy metal file cabinets?

But most of all, it's difficult to let go of one's children. With this move, Benton will no longer have a room of his own; he will have to sleep in a study on a sofa bed when he comes home from UT-Austin on holidays or during summers. Reconciling myself to the fact that Benton is essentially on his way out of our everyday lives has been the most difficult side-effect of this move.

All of Benton's belongings--the bedroom suit that was Tom's when he was a child, the books, the bookcases, the toys from Benton's childhood, the love seat that was Benton's great-great aunt's and that we had recovered for Benton--are all heading for storage until Benton moves out of his dorm room into an apartment of his own, the next stage in leaving childhood. It's a bitter joy watching one's child become an adult.

Letting go. . . . easier said than done.