OPENING CONFESSION

Several years ago I was starting my book on clutter.  My friend Kristen said:  We want to hear more of your story. 

That seems only fair, right?  So here goes.  I'm getting ready to move.  Again.  A dear friend gave me a gift of a great room to live in for a year.  The year is ending.  I am moving to another state.   Not enough mostly yard-sale furniture for a moving van.  So me, suitcases, laptop, cane, and UPS.

When I moved out of my old apartment, my family helped me shred mountains of paper, altough I'd had a computer for years.  Now I'm still throowing away paper. It's been embarassing.   Research findings that never turned into writing.  Writing that never got finished, some of which is already in the computer.  Some of which went on two thumb drives when the desktop outfit finally died.  Total, not go-to-the-tech died.  And what to do with fistfuls of medical insurance reports and bank statements and ugh.

What's even more embarrassing is that I was regretting saying goodbye to my right-height "desk," and my two sorta good, lamps, the burl end table and some dishes.  But the one thing I will need most in my new room, is my 'posture" chair and the ottoman.  And I don't know how to get them to Texas.

Since I recently had spinal fusion, I can't roll my wonderful rolling file, or reach into the file drawers, or get things off the bottom shelf of the folding shelves.  But I want to whine anyway about giving them up.

 Then the internet intervened.  There is a video called something about a changed coastline on the eastern US.   Forever.  I didn't even watch the whole thing.  It's not too hard to guess what it's like to watch your entire home tip into the sea.  No dryout, no rebuild.  Nothing.

That put my lamp, and file drawers, and folding shelves into perspective right away.  Especially since I once lived six houses from the other ocean, and I grew up on stories of what even Lake Michigan can destroy.

And I was also reminded of an article on the web maybe a year ago. The reported was in another country interviewing a woman whose humble dwelling had been filled with muddy water in a flash flood.  Her family was dragging some soaked items up a hill to where they would try to camp.  She told the reporter that she thanked God for letting the flood in the daytime, for had it been at night, they would all have drowned.   

More later. . .