Editing

Editing is a concept that I’ve yet to embrace.  In almost every facet of my life, I have a little too much.  I’m a collector and I’m sentimental, and this is a lethal combination.  I don’t think of myself as a hoarder, but that’s arguable.  One man’s hoarder is another man’s frugal “waste not, want not” type.  Who knows when I might be able to reuse that sheet with a hole in it?  What if a day comes when it is necessary to have a hundred saved wine bottles that never quite made it to recycling? 

It sounds bad, I know. 

My mother was one of those mothers who saved every book report and scrap of baby clothes.  She instilled in me and my brothers a sense of the animate in inanimate objects.  A pillow, for instance, might be very sad indeed if you threw it out after it spent twenty years dreaming with you. 

Add to this the fact that I am a very disorganized person and multiply that by almost seven years and this is the mountainous task that is sitting before me now when I realize that the day to move has come.  Joseph and I have to pare down our possessions and fit ourselves back into an apartment lifestyle. 

This is a colossal change in itself!  For seven years, Joseph and I have been living in a three bedroom farm house on five very blackberry-infested acres of land.  We can stomp our feet on the floors.  We can shout from one bedroom to another.  And we can crank up Joseph’s sound system as loud as we want when we watch sci-fi movies late at night.  These are all things I am going to have to edit to fit myself into a smaller, more urban space.  Because we are not just moving into an apartment, we are moving off-island and back into the mainstream of things.  I will have to go through this house bit by bit and box by box and shave off those pieces of my life that can live as an easily-carried memory and not as a memento.  This is not going to be an easy task.

But I am going to make it a challenge.  Every week I will pick a different room and get it shaved down, packed and ready to go.  This week will be my lavender room, also known as my craft room crap room.  Next week perhaps I’ll go for the living room.  And I think the following month will be a very good lesson in editing.