letting go of the stuff

my daughter came home from college for the the labor day weekend. it was great having her here. she helped to finish moving the last bits from the old apartment and then helped me to clean it and get it ready for the inspection on tuesday. she leaves today to go back to college.

it seems like a lot of the stuff in our lives is an "adventure". a couple of days before i went to get her, my exhaust system decided to develop a hole in it that is making for an interesting drive. it sounds more like a race car or a souped muscle car than the sedate little CRV i'd like it to be. obviously, there is no money to fix that right now ... so i have to live with it. but it made the 1.5 hour drive (one way) to get my daughter and the drive back with her loud. we turned up the radio and talked a bit louder in order to hear each other. and the stares from the ppl standing on the street in the city she's at were a little unnerving. it reminded me though that there were times when i would hear someone's loud exhaust and think, u really should midasize that. i wonder if ppl think that about me now when i drive by.

the new apartment is "coming along". its finding a place for everything that is difficult. and yesterday i went to make scalloped potatoes for lunch and realized that i had sold the only pan i had that would accommodate them... oh well ... i improvised and we did just fine.

the other thing i did yesterday was to put away the huge portraits of my ancestors in their gilded (but flaking) frames. however, in the process of doing so i ripped a hole in one of them. two of these pictures don't have the glass any more -- probably a good thing knowing me with glass items -- which would have protected this picture had it been present. at first i was like, i hate my life, and then i was like, well, i didn't really like their picture anyhow coz they looked mean. plus, what little i knew about them said that i wouldn't have liked them in real life anyhow ... so what did it matter.

but it got me to thinking about all the stuff i've carted around from place to place that has little to no meaning to me -- like these portraits. who are these ppl?? what were their lives like. idk a lot about them and honestly, i'm tired of carting this stuff around. is this how ppl's old tintype photos end up in boxes at antique markets??? relatives just get tired of hauling around photos of ppl they don't know and have no one else to pass it on to who is even the least little bit interested???

its difficult for me to say this because i am a scrapbooker and i had a store dedicated to that for years and told ppl how precious these things were. and now here i am confessing how much it bothers me to have to move my own dead relatives' portraits from apt. to apt. -- especially when each consecutive apartment gets smaller.

a friend came over last friday while i was cleaning and sorting and she commented on all the little pictures i have scattered all over my house of my immediate family and how at some point she was going to inherit this very same sort of thing from her mother and she was not relishing the idea. i feel sorry for my kids when i die -- they'll have to deal with all this stuff.

if this move has taught me anything at all, it has taught me that i need to start letting go. but where do i do that. with my great grandmother's blue willow china, the old portraits, the new photos. that's my problem ...