The Stuff We Keep

Since the start of 2012, I’ve been on the move- literally, figuratively and every other way you can imagine.

After almost 22 years of working at One Herald Square, the Boston Herald recently completed a move from an entire city block to office space in the Seaport District of Boston.  The process of planning, preparing, packing and purging took over half a year.  It was intense, complicated and sometimes emotional. What struck me most about the move was how attached people became to “stuff”- everything from chairs to pencil holders to tape dispensers.  There is one particularly disturbing scene involving an old keyboard pad bleeding out stuffing that my co-worker insisted she could sew that will forever haunt me.  

Trying to convince our staff to let go of the old and embrace the new was an intense and sometimes draining experience.  So how did I celebrate finally completing this process?

I decided to move my home as well.

So I began the process all over again, but this time with my stuff. And there was a lot of stuff.

There was high school stuff and college stuff. There was dog stuff- even though I haven’t owned a dog in over 15 years- and there were old sneakers, lots of old sneakers. There were race shirts and my brother’s coaching jackets, with his name embroidered. There were Halloween costumes, and clothing so old it looked like it could be a Halloween costume.  There were more freebies that I picked up at conferences than you could shake a stick at (whatever that means), including at least 20 tubes of lip balm with various logos on them.  There was expired medicine to cure just about every ailment, and more gift bags than I could remember getting gifts in.

As I sorted through what I had felt compelled to save for most of my life, mainly because I had the room to do so, the memories came back to me. There was my final exam from college where the notoriously difficult professor had given me an A++ and wrote a wonderful, personal message saying I had beautiful soul to go along with it. There was a sock puppet my high school friend Karen designed to look like me and an old pep rally script where I had replaced The Wizard of Oz sound track lyrics with various Go Salem Witches wording.

Each object had a memory or emotion behind it, that made the decision of “keep or save” sometimes heart wrenching.  But even more difficult were the memories of the house itself.

It was my brother’s house, the place where I cried in the closet as I was painting because I wasn’t sure it was the right move for me and didn’t want him to see I was upset. It was the place where I got to know my brother Stephen as a grown up, not as my little brother. It was the house where I recovered from cancer surgery, and where I found out Stephen had been killed by a drunk driver. It was the house I lived in alone, and then shared with my fiancé. 
For 13 years, I had laughed, grieved and healed in my home, and those memories are so much more important than what you can pack into a box.  And they are far easier to move because they will remain in storage in my heart for eternity.

So what “stuff” made the cut and what didn’t? And does it really matter?

Because at the end of the day, it’s just “stuff” after all.