Getting ready for a move is quite a process–one that I haven't had to think about for seven years. Now that our date is set for closing on a new house, the moving truck has been arranged, the boxes acquired, and the paperwork has been signed, it's now just a matter of wading through all the stuff that's been accumulating for such a long time.
Actually, I find that part of the process interesting–kind of like a treasure hunt. I was going through the drawers in my office the other day and found a whole collection of things I thought had disappeared and some stuff that has become obsolete over the last seven years–like a six-pack of unopened blank cassette tapes. Apparently these drawers have become a kind of mausoleum for dead and forgotten technologies as well.
I found a dozen golf balls in one drawer–golf balls given to me by a 96 year-old parishioner, now passed, who used to collect them from her yard next to the Park City Municipal course. She would give them to me about once a month, telling me, "I know you'll need them" and winking (because some of them were probably mine to begin with).
There were CDs full of pictures from past church events–pictures of smiling youth who are now parents themselves. There's a file of notes from a conference that I absolutely had to attend back in the day, but which I had completely forgotten about a year later (which is why I don't go to a lot of seminars anymore and just read the book). There's a journal that I started…and quit. A refill for a pen I no longer have. Software CDs for a computer that's long been obsolete.
It's amazing how we collect stuff and hold on to it, thinking that we'll need it someday and then forgetting about it completely in very short order.
I'm just sitting here wondering–what will be in my drawers seven years from now? What kinds of memories, pictures, technologies, ideas, will be housed in a new desk in a new place? Given my tendency to favor the expedience of a drawer over the pain of throwing something away, I'm sure there will be much to
