… Well, fascinating to me, at least. When you’re packing up your house of 3 years – a house to which you’ve brought memories and momentos (and yes, some junk) from the past 28 years of your life – interesting things are bound to turn up.
Here are 3 things I was happy to stumble upon…
1) Old IDs – lots of ’em. Should I ever need backup proof of identity, I think I’m covered. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to throw these out. I just seem to collect them… old college IDs, old beach club IDs, old YMCA IDs, old licenses. I guess I see them as unique links to my past, and as we’ve discussed, I’m unapologetically nostalgic. So with me they stay.
2) My yearbook from Senior year. I thought I was destined to only have yearbook proof of high school from my Freshman, Sophomore and Junior years. Not the case! We had a small graduating class, so we each got half a page to ourselves. It was fun to look back at the things I wrote – and to whom I wrote. Also? My hair was SO LONG.
3) A gift from my college boyfriend – Love Poems and Sonnets of William Shakespeare. I think I’ve kept this over the years (almost 10, to be exact) because, as simple as it is, it’s one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever received from a guy. We had actually broken up by the time my 19th birthday rolled around, but we had remained friends. His inscription was the perfect mix of sentimental and humorous. And who doesn’t love Shakespeare’s sonnets?
Then, of course, there are the things you didn’t necessarily need to find, like…
The missing half of a pair of pearl earrings. How it ended up underneath the futon in a bedroom I hardly ever went in is beyond me. I don’t have a photo because I threw it away soon after I found it; I had, after all, very recently – and very reluctantly – thrown out the non-missing half of the pair, thinking I’d never find the missing one. Murphy’s Law?
And there are the things you thought you would find during a MASSIVE cleaning of the house – but didn’t – like…
The keys that went missing in December 2007. I used my keys to drive home one day. The next day when I went to drive my car, the keys were nowhere to be found. As of August 2009, it remains an unsolved mystery.
Tomorrow we close on the house. The next move is to NYC. I’ll be going from a 2,500 sq. ft. house to something probably about the size of my bedroom. Many of the momentos will have to stay behind. But I’m bringing #1-3 with me.