I've been thinking a lot about packing, moving and collecting things.  I grew up in a family that saves everything.  I guess that's what happens when your parents run an antique store.  This means I am used to old things and never getting rid of anything because who knows when you might need that broken-thing or when you might realize that that broken-thing might have another life in it as something different-but-still-useful or something slightly re-purposed?  With this kind of thinking and saving ingrained in me from an early age (I have the sticker book, stamp collection and boxes of baseball cards to prove it), it's been hard for me to give my things away to friends, slight harder to give them to charity and difficult to throw things out. I know that I have to do it but it's still hard.<!--more-->

But it's been a good task:  I've been reminded that I don't need as much as I think I do and that I don't need to hold on to everything.  It hasn't made it easier though.

Let go is harder for some people than others.  I know this.  This is how my father makes a living.  He sells the things that others saved and saved--often for a life time.   It's because of this that these days I can't get out of my head an estate sale that my father managed years ago.  The owner of the house had died and her children need help with the estate and for good reason, the woman had a small three bedroom house and it was full to the brim. Every drawer, every shelf and every corner had something in it or on it.

But it's the pantry that I cannot forget.  She had a series of shoe boxes labeled and lined up in fairly neat rows even though none of the boxes where exactly the same size.  On the outside of each box she had written what was inside.  The boxes read things like: rubber bands, paper clips, pencils and tape.  If you looked inside sure enough there would be the rubber bands from every newspaper she received in the last 20 years--crumbling green rubber.  This woman clearly never got rid of anything.   I couldn't imagine what one little old woman was ever going to do with this many rubber bands but she had them stored away and clearly labeled.  They were there if she needed them.

And then there was the box that has been haunting me since I started packing my things up a couple of weeks ago.  This shoe box read: sting too short to use.

Yes, string too short to use.  Part of me expected that it was a joke but looking around her home I knew that it was real.  The box had in it hundreds of little pieces of string.  Some were a couple of inches long others shorter but just as she had written on the box they were all unusable.  Still something compelled her to save them.  All of them. She knew they were too short to do anything with but she couldn't stand to throw them out.  Maybe it was because she grew-up during the depression or maybe it was something else but that box of sting is now unforgettable.

So as I have filled up boxes with books, a quilt and photos, I've been thinking a lot about this woman and her box of string and what compels us to save things that we know and admit freely are useless.  Given the state of this woman's home, I think that she may have had a real problem, an actual compulsion but for me natural instinct is to save things.  There is comfort in knowing that you have certain things--things that make an otherwise white and beige room in a group house feel like home or things that remind you friends.  Then there is the other stuff not useless but also not necessary and  I've caught myself thinking: what if I need this later? But then I have to remind myself, the thing is, I won't need that later and if I do, I can find it or something like it.

I am not saying that I didn't send some crazy stuff home, stuff that when I get back from Bulgaria I will probably wonder why I thought that I needed to send it to myself and store it at my parents house. Now, I am trying to mindful.  I've given or thrown away the useless things because at the very least I don't want strangers going through my things years from now and wondering why I saved my own version of "a box of string too short to use." But frankly, there is something reassuring in knowing that you can give away and get rid of not only the" string too short to use" items but also the practical useful things and still be okay.

That and I am moving to a fully furnished one-bedroom apartment in Sofia.