It’s all well and good to turn to your husband and say, “Do you want to move to Europe?” It’s a whole other thing to figure out what to do with every single aspect of your life. Do you keep your house? Do you keep all of your stuff? What happens to all 27 of your unfinished craft projects? How do you help your 13-year-old figure out what to keep/trash/donate? How do you say goodbye to family, friends, and neighbors?
In our case, we’re renting out our house and keeping a room for storage. But, we’re also using this as an opportunity to purge the years worth of junk (and not-so-junk) that we’ve accumulated. Which is why, just a few days ago, my living room looked like this:
I’ve found a few hacks along the way. I organize and clear things out as they’re sorted, to avoid visual clutter (no need to make our puny human brains do any more extra work than is necessary). I prompt Lilian to pull out items that are for sure coming with us. We pull out the items that we know are trash. I say, “would you clean dog poop off of that in order to keep it?” I do a lot of literal hand-holding.
But this process is still hard.
We had a little bon voyage party on Saturday (if you’re reading this and are annoyed that we didn’t invite you, please know that you should have been on the list, but my overwhelmed human brain could just barely create the evite, and I missed a lot of names). One of our guests very helpfully reminded me that we’re in the absolute worst part of the move right now. I sure did need to hear that.
And then, I made everyone go through a big pile of stuff I didn’t want to keep and take stuff home with them. I made a big pile of “stuff to take” before the party and our guests got it down to a small enough pile to take to Savers in my station wagon.
Also, my Dad took the phrase “everything must go” literally. At one point, I looked down from my deck to see my brother-in-law taking down our (mostly) dead tree with a chainsaw.
You know you threw an epic party when the chainsaw comes out.
Seriously, though, a dedicated group of family and friends pulled stuff out of our basement and shed, helped us bring out furniture, bagged up trash, etc. My Dad hauled most of it away. A few friends took the rest. And someone claimed Lilian’s bedroom furniture in the wee small hours of the morning. I still have a ton of work to do over the next couple of days, but things are mostly cleared out or spoken for.
These things are simultaneously true: It’s exhausting to sort through the accumulation of 17 years spent in a house. It’s incredibly joyous and freeing to give things away.
Do I want to keep the 12 pairs of crappy leggings that my child once insisted on saving for their hypothetical future children? No, but it did make me wildly nostalgic to set aside all of the little clothes that it feels like they were wearing yesterday. My friend Nancy is a literal angel on earth for helping me process and sort it all.
At the same time, I gave things away through our local Buy Nothing group that I liked but that their new owners loved. I passed on cooking equipment that was basically just taking up space in my basement and now will be used and appreciated by my little brother. We gave Lilian’s old hiking backpack and stuffed rat to my niece and the pure joy of watching her play with it made me so glad that we hadn’t just thrown it in a box.
Oh, and I’m bringing all my unfinished craft projects to my mom’s house. I’ll be living there for a decent chunk of time this fall while I work out some job stuff. Here’s hoping I can put a big dent in the pile. It turns out that starting projects and finishing projects are two entirely different hobbies. And, I’m mostly into the former.
Leaving behind friends and family is a lot harder. We’ve let folks know that they are all welcome to come visit us any time. Oh, you’re going to be in Europe this winter? Lyon has an airport, the TGV, the Eurostar, etc. I don’t mind showing up at your family vacation. I’ll bring wine. But, it’s not the same thing as knowing you can text your neighbors for just about anything and knowing that they’ll help out. It’s not the same as seeing my lyra and adult tap classes every week. It’s not the same as being there for my Girl Scout troop. We’ll make friends in France. We’ll meet our neighbors. But, I’m going to miss the hell out of the amazing community we’re part of here.
I close my eyes and imagine that I’ve just woken up in Lyon and I’m about to run out for a croissant. I picture an apartment that’s easy to keep clean because it isn’t filled with stuff I don’t need and never use. I visualize running errands by tram and train. I think about how happy I’ll be to finally finish that quilt that I started working on twenty years ago. (Omg, the shame).
This is me not complaining about our move. That would be the first world-y of first world problems.
But, I am pretty ready to be done with it.
