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What Remains
When it’s time to sell your home after 26 years
Recently, I spent 10 weeks, 7 days per week, 10 hours per day, sorting through 26 years of possessions, preparing to sell my Woodstock home — infused as it was with countless memories of birth, death, fire, celebration, children, love, friends, inspiration, rites of passage, dreams, dancing, bedtime stories, baby showers, live opera, dead mice, and ten thousand outtakes from the movie that seemed to be my life.
I kept having to decide what to take, what to toss, what to give away, what to sell, and what to put in storage.
Michelangelo, when asked how he created The David, said it best. “I simply took away everything that wasn’t.”
Indeed! The statue was always in the stone. All he had to do was remove what wasn’t. Less is more. Or as Dizzy Gillespie once said, “It took my entire life to learn what not to play.”
And so, as I gave away, threw away, tossed, sold, and stashed, I got a chance to experience the odd revelation of seeing what remained — my own metaphorical David being revealed to me.
What I noticed was this: no matter what form these objects took, they all served the same function: remembrance!
