The "stuff" must go

Back home again to start another round of planning for our departure. It was the end of May and we'd sold our house! Jack still had script work to finish and at the gallery we had just mounted our second show of museum grade New Guinea art. I was doing research and writing the information sheets we always provided at our gallery at each showing. (This was a drawing I'd done in my journal of a mask in the exhibit). We couldn't leave the States until September and the people who bought our house needed to move in on July 1st. What to do in the two months we'd be homeless?

The two real estate agents came up with a brilliant solution that would allow us to hold a mortgage on the house - giving us income while we were gone and a balloon payment in 3 years. Our agent and friend offered to let us stay in the mother-in-law apartment he had in his house for the month of July. We thought we could get away and go camping for some weeks in August -then stay with friends or family until we had to leave.

Meanwhile we had a month to pack up or sell 20 years of accumulated"stuff".

The law of the "conservation of stuff" says that at some point we all must get rid of "stuff", which then is purchased by others who then must get rid of some of their "stuff", ensuring that when we returned there would still be plenty of "stuff" that we could start accumulating all over again. But meanwhile, whatever "stuff" we wanted to keep would have to go into storage for a few years so space was limited. Since we would have to pay for everything we stored, we got pretty ruthless about what we would get rid of. I started making lists - what we would keep (those things that were particularly precious and hard to replace) - what we would take with us (very little) - and what we would get rid of in one way or another (most of what now filled our house). Hard decisions - but liberating in a way!