When guests stop by our home these days, they're greeted with a scene straight out of a flea market. We're moving to a smaller home and emptying out cabinets and drawers in order to sort their contents into "Keep" and "Dispose Of" piles.
Most of our larger items (mainly furniture) that clearly won't fit in the new house were sorted weeks ago and have already been promised to friends and family. All that's left now are the smaller, sentimental items that are so hard to give away.
Unless, of course, these items are claimed by our children and stay in the family.
I'd been counting on our grown children, particularly the older ones with homes of their own, to jump at the chance to own some of these things. But if any jumping is taking place, it's a rapid leaping away from most of our family "treasures."
Take, for instance, the flowery china my mother received as a wedding gift back in the midcentury. It takes only the quickest of glances at the pretty plates and sweet little cups for the kids to render a verdict: "Ugh, no." Fine, I decide to save it all for tea parties with our grandchildren, despite my husband's look of consternation. He had already mentally marked the china as at long last gone.
Our favorite DVDs from years of family movie nights? My husband agrees with our children again: Nobody watches DVDs anymore. I opt to save just a few of my personal favorites, disregarding his protest that we no longer own a DVD player. He has forgotten the small TV I occasionally keep on my desk. It plays DVDs and is already packed for the move.
I tell him I can't part with everything. He tells me I can't part with anything.
Eventually, the kids spot something that they'd all like to keep, though it's not in the "Dispose Of Pile" - a life-sized cardboard cutout of their dad, left over from a work event of many years ago. Those rascally kids used to take turns hiding it throughout the house and scaring visitors who suddenly sensed a "human" presence when entering a darkened room. I finally had to hide it from them when a family friend nearly fell down the stairs after being startled by it.
I can't hand it over to them now, for fear it could be used to scare the daylights out of their dear parents. But no worries, I won't be depriving our children forever of the one item they really want. When they come for a visit in our new home, they might just find a life-sized surprise waiting for them behind a closet door.
- Barb Johannesen of Hinsdale is a former contributing columnist. Readers can email her at [email protected].
