Move Update

With thanks to
alalara.deviantart.com
for the "free to use or share" artwork

I was all about congratulating myself on the great job I'd done purging. We came in almost 5,000 pounds below the moving estimation of 20,000 pounds. The estimate was almost 3,000 pounds below our shipping weight when we moved from Georgia to Virginia -- twelve years ago. Pre-kids, too.

I practically dislocated my shoulder patting myself on the back when our packers announced we had only 120 boxes. We moved to California with over 400 boxes. Not quite six years ago. With two kids rather than three. After I purged about three rooms worth of belongings in preparation for that move.

Well, folks, I'm unpacking now. Including the boxes from the storage unit, which of course the packers didn't count, I think we still came in under 200 boxes. But I'm sitting in my office looking at THIRTEEN BOXES OF BOOKS (not to mention the ones in other parts of the house) and I'm thinking maybe I could have done a little better.

Now, I have experienced purge regret. In a burst of enthusiasm when I first encountered the Zero Waste Home I purged a ridiculous number of shoes. Later that same season I found myself wishing I could have half of them back. There is one particularly adorable pair of wedge-heeled loafers that I will never be able to replace that would have gone beautifully with some wide-legged jeans...

I digress.

It will be interesting to see how much I unbox that I could have left behind. Now that the kitchen is in functioning order I will start trying to take pictures, and once we find my husband's camera I'll even try to make them good pictures.

In the meantime, look around the space you're in and find fifteen things you can part with. Imagine yourself unboxing them after a move (preferably when you're looking for something vital, like the bath towels), and think what you'd feel like if you opened a box and found that item looking at you.

If it hurts to think of parting with it, then imagine yourself using it. While unpacking my kitchen boxes I found all my canning equipment and immediately got excited, picturing myself as once again the Mad-Scientist-Mom whose favorite holiday reading was make-it-don't-buy-it cookbooks. I envision teaching my children confidence and self-sufficiency while we labor over bubbling pots together. (This is dangerous, by the way; my daughter will now only eat salmon and broccoli prepared by moi.)

I'm unpacking more than just boxes. I'm unpacking the life we intend to build here, from the practical to the playful. When I'm knee-deep in packing paper, with many more boxes before I sleep, it helps to remember that bigger picture.

Junk Mail

The one thing I did well at the Big House was to reduce our receipt of junk mail to a tiny, tiny trickle. It was such a tiny trickle that we received no mail at all probably two or three days a week. Given the amount of paper that a family with three school-aged children can generate, this made a significant dent in the amount of garbage that required my attention on any given day.

Now we're in the new house and we are coping with the junk mail generated by the previous inhabitants. This is not a commentary on their habits or values. But wrestling with the volume of junk mail that other people are accustomed to was a bit of a shock. I'd taken the reduced inflow for granted.

I have said before that living a simple life requires diligence in your willingness to say NO. We have built an intrusive culture in the last 20-30 years. Not only do we let advertising into our homes through television, radio, and magazines (including the internet versions of those media), but we've got people literally calling our homes, knocking on our doors, mailing things to us, and even standing outside our favorite stores demanding things of us. Whether they're charming or pitiful or earnest or demanding, they're intrusive. I just want to go about my business. I want to choose my own businesses to patronize, my own charities to support, and my own causes to champion.

GET OUT OF MY FACE.

I'm learning the art of the firm NO. It has to be very, very firm; any sign of sympathy or wavering only invites more charm or puppy-eyes.

No Means No.

I've been busy with other things and automatically recycling the catalogs without thinking too much about them. Until this weekend. This weekend, whichever kid carried in the mail actually grunted from the weight. The main offender was a pair of Restoration Hardware catalogs, bundled together in a plastic sleeve, one of which was 690 pages. There were four other catalogs in the stack, and, oh yeah, my husband's paystub.

That's it. I'm done. Time to take action.

My previous success at stopping junk mail required a visit to only two websites.

DMAChoice.org is a generalist site. You create an account tied to an email. After activating the account, you individually choose each type of mail -- credit card offers, catalog offers, magazine offers, and other -- and choose to block either ALL new offers, or only offers from specific companies.

You can't actually block credit card offers directly from DMAChoice.org. When you select credit offers, you are referred to an outside site, OptOutPrescreen.com, where you are asked for a lot of detailed personal information, including address and social security number. This is terrifying, so I checked around. The best source I found for the reliability of the website was actually the Federal Trade Commission website: it issued an alert titled "Where to Go To Just Say No." Not only do I love the title, but it is the first hint I have seen in quite a long time that the government actually cares about the quality of life of ordinary Americans.

In the course of my research, I saw conflicting claims that opting out of prescreened credit offers can raise your credit by as much as 20-30 points. This is unconfirmed. Some say that it only helps your credit by keeping you from accepting new offers, others that it helps by keeping organizations from pinging your credit report without your knowledge (too many hits on your credit report can impact your score). The FTC alert only addresses the impact of unsolicited offers can have on your quality of life, and that is my motivation for blocking the offers. Simply opting out in itself does nothing to your credit score, so the effect, if it exists, would occur over time.

Finally, there is CatalogChoice.org.  I love Catalog Choice. It blocks individual catalogs. It is the source  for blocking the individual publications that pass through the DMAChoice net. These are companies that you, or the prior resident of your abode, have done business with, but which you no longer want to hear from. They offer a pretty detailed list of reasons you can give for refusing mail from an individual company, ranging from "I want to help the environment" to "I prefer to do business with this company online only" to "the person on this catalog doesn't live here anymore/is deceased." (!!) As with DMAChoice, you create an account tied to an email, and then you use the actual catalog to stop receipt. When I first started working with Catalog Choice in 2007 a lot of the companies required me to follow up personally, either through a phone call, a visit to their website, or an email directly from my email address. Catalog Choice was, and remains, incredibly helpful in working through those obstacles, but it is a tribute to the organization's effectiveness that when I added the nine catalogs I was blocking from our address today, three of them had standard acknowledgement messages pop up on the Catalog Choice website thanking the user for letting them know our preferences. There will be no wait for my preferences to take effect with those companies.

Who says one person can't make a difference?

My other favorite thing about Catalog Choice is the statistics they display on their website. I don't know if they're accurate, but they give me warm fuzzies. Over the last five years I have requested that 46 catalogs be blocked; probably a third of those are marked as "Waiting Confirmation" (from the company), but I no longer receive the item. So I don't know if the unconfirmed items are included in my personal environmental savings. As of today, this is the impact on the environment from catalogs blocked through Catalog Choice:


FULLY GROWN TREES: 783,532
YOU SAVED 2

POUNDS OF GREENHOUSE GAS: 326,333,345
YOU SAVED 671

POUNDS OF SOLID WASTE: 115,680,782
YOU SAVED 238

GALLONS OF WATER: 785,922,380
YOU SAVED 1,615

(Environmental impacts calculated using the EPN Paper Calculator)

I say again: Who says one person can't make a difference?

Happy Blocking!

If you found this information useful, please Like on Facebook or reTweet -- help spread the word so we can continue improving our personal quality of life and impact on the world around us!

What Is a Simple Life?

It's been quiet around here for a few weeks because I've been stumped.

A friend of mine recently posted a question on Facebook: "What is simple living?"

Well, don't I feel like a bonehead for not asking that question of myself in the first place.

Seven other people responded to her question. Some said simple living with kids was not possible. Some described what was essentially a peaceful afternoon. One said, no, who cares about a simple life? Embrace its craziness!

My response to her post went like this: For me it's a matter of making only the choices that are important to my quality of life, including commitments and belongings. It's not having to spend time taking care of things and having more time and mental space to do, think, create, and share.

I thought about her question a bit more and added: I think a simplified life requires constant vigilance because of the difficulty of saying no.

But now that I've had three weeks to stew about the question, and look around at different ways that people have tried to answer that question, I think I have at least something to throw out there. As a start. And I reserve the right to change my mind or expand on the ideas I'm kicking out here today.

The original impetus for simplifying came during a time when I felt totally overwhelmed with my life and unable to make time to do the things that were important to me.  I've already recounted how I discovered The Zero Waste Home and the impact Bea Johnson had on me. Johnson actually has two simultaneous endeavors going on at once in her household: zero waste living and also "simplifying," which when you read what she's actually doing sounds more like minimalism.

In one of her posts Bea Johnson said that Little House on the Prairie was her favorite TV show because of the simplicity of life that it portrayed. Ignoring the many anachronisms from that show (my personal favorite being how people drove their gigantic wagons pulled by gigantic horses around just like they were driving a station wagon... but I suppose I can laugh about that another time), I want to point out that if you actually look at the sets they are chock full of stuff, including lots of multiples -- something Johnson finds offensive in her own home life. Moreover, I don't know what's "simple" about, for example, rousing all your children, aged 5 and up, out of their warm beds at two or three in the morning to save the corn crop from an unseasonable snap freeze, as Laura Ingalls Wilder recounts in Farmer Boy. Or in eating the same meal over and over and over again for weeks at a time because there is absolutely no other food available. It's not simplified living if you can't choose where you simplify.

But I digress.

So what is simple living? I think it's focused living. I have some goals and some values.

• To live in a way that hurts as few people as possible
• To never stop learning or changing my mind about what I thought I knew
• To be kind and supportive of other people
• To be healthy for my entire adult life so that when I'm old I don't die infirm
• To be as good a writer as I can possibly be
• To be pretty (I know it's vain, but it's true)
• To make all the choices that reflect how rich and varied life can be that are consistent with the path I have set for myself

For my children, I want:

• Good health and an excellent sense of themselves
• Diligence in the presence of failure or uncertainty
• Habits that will make it easier for them to make the choices that will make them happy
• The time and leisure to do childish things
• The opportunity to find out what they love and what they are good at

For our entire family:

• Gratitude for all that blesses us

Anything that distracts me from these goals and values for myself or my family is complicating my life. This doesn't mean that the life I have laid out for myself is simple in itself; in many ways it's a lot more complicated than living unconsciously. Just the goal of being healthy, for instance, requires a lot of effort. I have to determine what kind of diet will best further that goal; I have to be conscious of what is actually going into the foods I bring home and prepare, or what I choose when we eat out. I have to make the effort to make exercise a part of my schedule, and figure out how to make it part of my kids' schedule as well, so that they will learn it as an ordinary and necessary part of life, like sleep. When I fall off the wagon (as I do regularly) I have to pay attention to what I let distract me from my goals and make the effort to rebuild in a way that won't set me up for failure again.

No, this kind of life is not simple, but it's a lot simpler than relying on (and paying for) ten prescriptions with all the complications (read: side effects) they bring. It's simpler than being miserable for being fat and not fitting my favorite clothes and thereby violating my goal of being pretty. It's simpler than trying to undo the consequences of not making the effort -- and that I know for sure, because I'm doing it now. It's simpler than wondering what life could have been if I had lived it according to my own desires.

Owning too much stuff also distracts from my goals and values. I can't be grateful for my blessings if I'm drowning in them. Not being able to find things is my biggest, biggest peeve ever. I resent and loathe the waste of every minute spent looking for things that are buried under things I don't care about. Downsizing from the Big House has been a great improvement on this problem -- there are only so many places any given thing can be in this little house -- but it still happens occasionally. I do not want to spend my life looking for things. That is so not simple.

Of course the lists above are only partial, but it probably would help me a lot to make a more thorough, personal list for my own use to keep me on track. As my children get older I'd like to distill it into a family motto that we could post in our home, something they have had a say in so that they have a stake in living it. I'm also finding that over-simplifying is not a good idea. Living in a little rental house in a walkable neighborhood is nice in many ways, but it precludes the vegetable garden I enjoyed, and the decorating possibilities that make me feel creative and capable. That's not simple, it's unnecessarily ascetic and unsustainable. Finding and maintaining a simple life is, I think, a constant work in progress.

If you want to explore all kinds of ways of adopting a simple life, here are some of the resources I looked at while I was stewing over this post:

Since I'm a Wikipedia junky I'll share the definition for simple living found there:

Simple living encompasses a number of different voluntary practices to simplify one's lifestyle. These may include reducing one's possessions or increasing self-sufficiency, for example. Simple living may be characterized by individuals being satisfied with what they need rather than want. Although asceticism generally promotes living simply and refraining from luxury and indulgence, not all proponents of simple living are ascetics. Simple living is distinct from those living in forced poverty, as it is a voluntary lifestyle choice.  

Adherents may choose simple living for a variety of personal reasons, such as spirituality, health, increase in "quality time" for family and friends, work–life balance, personal taste, frugality, or reducing personal ecological footprint and stress. Simple living can also be a reaction to materialism and conspicuous consumption. Some cite socio-political goals aligned with the anti-consumerist or anti-war movements, including conservation, degrowth, social justice, ethnic diversity, tax resistance and sustainable development.

The Year of Less and The Complete Guide to Imperfect Homemaking (same mom runs both blogs)

Unclutterer 

Miss Minimalist and The Joy of Less, both by Francine Jay

Think Simple Now

Zen Habits 

The Simplicity Collective

Liberal Simplicity

Simple Mom

Paper Clutter

Today is Saturday.  I'm sitting in the living room, cleaning out some paper clutter that has been weighing on me since... Oh, I don't know, I've had paper clutter weighing on me since I encountered adulthood.

This seems like a good moment to give a shout out to my friends from college.  In the early 1990's, not everyone had a computer to themselves, and I was one of the fortunate few who did.  It was an enormous "portable" computer with a six-inch green-and-black screen and two floppy disk drives (the luxury!) and it weighed about as much as an overpacked suitcase.  I had my own printer too, an utterly aggravating dot matrix that invariably failed to function on the date that any paper was due.  If I had a paper to turn in I always turned up about halfway through the class. (Probably I should have started my three page papers more than thirty minutes before they were due; putting words on a page has never been a problem for me).

Anyway, I was generous with my electronic access -- my friends could use my computer whenever they needed, and in thanks they tidied my dorm room up for me.  Thanks, Alene, Heather, Tiara, and anyone else unlucky enough to need me!  You guys rocked!!

As a resident advisor I had piles and piles and piles of paper coming through my inbox every day. I was expected to hang it on the floor bulletin boards.  Sometimes I did, usually I missed the dates.  I had no system for managing it and nobody ever suggested the idea of a routine to me.  I just made random choices moment to moment, based on what I "felt like" and what was most urgent at the time.  When I graduated from college most of the paper problem evaporated, but now that I have three kids in school it has returned with a vengeance (home ownership has an impact as well, though I haven't not been one long enough to see the improvement).

I'm a grown up and it's summer vacation.  I can take the time to create a process that will keep me from having to bring in help in dealing with all this paper.  I'd like to also model a rather better strategy for dealing with my paper for my kids, as well, so they find themselves less overwhelmed as they grow into their own paper problems.

So today I am clearing the decks.  I've got a stack of recipes that have been collecting wine spots on my counters and a stack of magazines to cull.  I found one this morning from 2002 -- YIKES. I'm pleased to see how much useful information I'm encountering, though, so I'll share a few strategies I'm working on to deal with all this crap these responsibilities.

1.  File folders.  Bonehead!  Yes, it has taken me nine years to figure out that I need file folders.  I'm sorry, but I'm a slow learner.  No, actually I'm not a slow learner; I've just been slow to appreciate that what I'm doing is important enough to merit file folders. In my former life as a CPA/corporate tax preparer, file folders, red and blue pencils, and my computer were the primary tools of my trade.  Somehow, when I stopped working in that profession, I devalued myself.  Only people with "real careers" need file folders, right? The rest of us are just indulging in org porn.  WRONG! I need file folders! I need to know where I've kept all the home maintenance receipts and the kids' school papers, the directories for church and school, the medical stuff... I need a lot of file folders. And it only took me ten years to value home management as a valid activity worth investing a few supplies... that I already have around the house. Aries is certainly a bone-headed sign...

2.  Binders.  My mother-in-law started me with my first binder when my husband and I were engaged.  She gave me a gigantic three-inch binder filled with magazine tear sheets in sheet protectors. It was all home decorating information: pictures of beautiful rooms filled all three inches (do you know how many pictures that was???)  That binder was a godsend when we bought our fixer-upper, when I was expecting babies and creating nurseries for them, and especially when we remodeled.  I added more binders over the years: a gardening binder, one for the holidays, and a recipe binder.  When my husband was doing more DIY projects I created one for him as well, though at the moment all but the decorating and recipe binders are currently disbanded.  I'm going to create two new ones that reflect my current interests and abilities -- no point in fantasizing about elaborate garden and holiday projects I can't indulge: articles about writing, and fashion inspirations.

3.  Evernote. The binder system works beautifully for image-heavy content; it's like the pre-Pinterest Pinterest, but not so great for more detailed information.  (reasons I'm not using Pinterest anymore here)  Sheet protectors prevent organizing tabs from being visible and I generally want a whole menu, rather than a single recipe, when I am coming up with meals.  I'm trying to be sort of low-carb and would love ideas for breakfasts that start me off successfully.  My kids love traditional breakfasts any time of day and I want to know how to make treats that are more nutritious for them. I have family recipes I don't want to lose track of, but that I also don't want to make more than once a year. My usual method for getting recipes is to pull them off internet searches, especially epicurious.com, and then I have a stack of cooking-stained scrap papers with ingredient proportions, no instructions; fifty-fifty if they have a recipe name attached to them.  The longer they hang around the more successful I consider them, but either way I have to read the ingredient proportions to know what it is.  I've been using Evernote for my novel planning, but it took my husband pointing out its usefulness for recipe organization.  Using this system will make it easier for me to prepare weekly menus and shopping lists, as well.

4.  Bins.  Every organizing article and book I've ever read (no small number) asks: What the hell do I do with all the kid output? In my attic I have a 30-gallon tote full of all the stuff my mom saved from my childhood. I know what's in it because it was my childhood, but otherwise it is of almost no interest to me. My husband has a 3.0 cubic foot moving box from his childhood. I might have looked in it when we were newly married, but I couldn't tell you today what is in it. We don't care a whole lot about that stuff, but we also recognize that when our children are older they might find it interesting. So I have designated a 17-gallon bin for each of my children to last the entire time they are under my roof.

When we moved to California from Virginia I learned that the further I get from the time the artwork was created, the easier it is to discard it. When I had been away from the children for a little over a week to empty the house and see to the boxing up and shipping, I couldn't bear to toss all their little drawings and projects.  A year after the move-in, I could not understand why I had trucked all that stuff three thousand miles. (Sure am glad I didn't pay to ship it!) I kept one piece. But with the bins, I have a place to store the stuff till I have enough perspective to choose my favorites, to see how they develop so I can choose the piece that is most representative of what kind of people they were, and to have new darlings that I need to make room for.

*   *   *

I've been silent for a week or more, as I struggle to put together a post that I should probably have done first.  I want to come up with a definition for simple living, a question that was posed by a friend on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. It has been harder than I thought (and not helped by losing half an entry from some kind of Blogger glitch), so I'm asking for some help.  What is Simple Living to you? What are you looking for when you read these posts?  What changes are you looking to make in your own lifestyle?

And in the meantime: Don't be afraid to invest in your own needs.  Take your role as Home CEO seriously enough to have a planned home for the documents that are generated in this not-simple world we are navigating and make your life a little simpler. Recognize when things that used to work don't, and be willing to adjust.  And most importantly, think about what works for you, your personality, your household, and your activities.

And if you're blogging, please be sure to use pictures and text that you have permission to use. Simple generally precludes being involved in a legal action.

Lessons Learned

1. Buy low, sell high.
2. Depending on your geographical location and personal priorities, renting rather than owning a home can be a very good use of your resources (especially if you can't meet condition 1).
3. If you must move, hire very good movers.  And have the courtesy to be prepared for them.
4. Storage units always look bigger when they're empty.
5. The size of the job will expand to the amount of time available.
6. The amount of time available will generally involve an all-nighter. 
7. It is a lot harder to figure out what to do with the stuff you are purging than it is to determine what to purge.
8. If at all possible, try to avoid moving simultaneously with the end of the school year.
9. Since the laundry (and all other ordinary chores) won't happen during a move, buy extra underwear.
10. When one door closes, another door opens.  But that doesn't mean it might not be a bit of a walk to find the open door (that's a Stephen King Dark Tower reference).
11. This too shall pass.

Right-Sizing: Or, I Am Not a Minimalist

Well, the Big House has found a buyer.  Everything that's still in it either comes to the Little House, the storage unit, or out into the world.

In theory, everything except the art on the walls, some of the furniture, and the wedding china could leave my possession.  In theory.

A few years ago, I was participating in a local online-only moms club.  The online-only part is important; women said some of the most amazing, outrageous things under the mighty thin anonymity of a username like "MindyA" or "EllasMom."  Cris-de-coeur like "Am I ever going to get my waist back?" or "At what age did YOUR baby sleep at night?" were interspersed with outrageously personal details about their sex lives, their (or their husbands') DUIs, nanny problems, mother-in-law problems, and requests for gardeners.  And of course, repeated complaints about The Mess.

I doubt I need to explain The Mess.  But since I do need to vent, I will share what our Mess currently consists of:

• Toy cars
• Various jump ropes
• Move debris (books, etc. that had been used for staging but can now come home to Mama)
• Quentin's "Writing Office" where he is conducting his Write On Mamas writing class -- this is a big plastic tool chest thingy with paper & pencils on top.  The boys are numbering all the rooms in the house, except the living room, which has been designated the Write On Mamas Conference Room.  Quentin says he is On Writing Duty.
• Various shoes and dirty socks
• Backpacks
• School work that they are returning for my inspection which I have not yet inspected
• Folded laundry on the couch -- usually it's not folded, but I spiffed the place up for y'all
• Miscelleneous detritis that I'm not willing to admit to

So, every happy family I know has a Mess.  And everybody complains about the Mess.  And it popped up regularly on the forum.  Complaining about the Mess was always a hot topic, with responses usually wordy and ranging from some variation of "don't worry about it, enjoy your kids while they're little" to "I make the kids clean up each type of toy or game before they move on to the next one" (which I personally object to, but probably that person doesn't have items on her Mess list that she won't admit).  

There was one exception, one time.  The response consisted of a single line:

zerowastehome.blogspot.com

Well, that's almost like God sending you a little text message cutting through all that wordy crap and saying "CHECK OUT THIS BLOG."

So of course I did.  

Now, if you are remotely interested in being green, or reducing your waste, you have probably encountered Bea Johnson and her family.  She's been all over the place in the last two years: the Today show, People magazine, the New York Times and Sunset magazine, to name her highest profile appearances (sorry, the link to the Sunset article was password protected; check your library for the December 2010 issue).  I went a little cross-eyed looking at the blog, at first, not understanding if I was seeing what I was really seeing, so then I clicked over to the New York Times article.

That entire article had an impact on me, and it all started with this paragraph:

It’s like some kind of amazing magic trick. Bea has a husband, two sons (ages 10 and 8) and a dog, and yet her household generates no empty containers, no food scraps, no dirty paper towels, no broken toys, no crumpled wrapping paper, no empty ketchup packets from fast-food restaurants, no orphan socks with holes in the toes. 

Nothing.

Ever.

Doesn't that sound beautiful?  Amazing?  Magical, as the article says?

Yes.  Yes, it does.

Imagine a life without the mess.

...

WAKE UP!!


Yes, back to reality.  Back to where Bea Johnson has led where I can't follow.

The thing is, in addition to being nearly zero waste, she's also a true minimalist.  There is a pretty detailed inventory of her house over the course of her blog entries, and it's impressive.

Her house is beautiful.  It's all white, with little pops of orange, which is one of my favorite colors.  And it is, as described, utterly uncluttered.  If you toodle around on her blog you'll find lots of places where she details all the things she got rid of and why she found them unnecessary.

But as I have been packing away many of my belongings, the ones that were used to stage the house and give it personality, I have realized that, although many of those things have little real value, I do find them beautiful.  I am sad to be packing them up with no sense of when I might see them again.

Can I live without the little Fiestaware vase & cherub arrangement that I seem to create in each of my homes?  For sure.  But somehow, seeing the green vase and the cherub holding the (fake) mistletoe ball, which I'm sure Bea Johnson would find too tacky for words, makes me feel... I don't know... at home.  I mean, I've occupied five dwellings in the twelve years that those items have been part of my life, so they certainly have more permanence to me than any building has had.

Can I live without my John Lennon calendar hanging over my desk?  Well, yes.  I have only had it since November (and couldn't even hang it till March, owing to the Big House being staged).  But it calls to mind a set of memories that wouldn't need to surface otherwise: looking at a big painting of John in New York City, priced at $14,000, at some ridiculous store at the Mirage in Las Vegas, laughing with my husband about "maybe someday" -- and then coming back to the hotel room later to find that he'd bought me the calendar, the cover of which is the photo that inspired the painting.  That weekend, when everything was smooth and easy and not distracted by children or house stuff.  It reminds me of how much my husband, who doesn't usually buy me flowers but got the John Lennon calendar and 82% cacao chocolate bars, knows and and loves me.  With all these children and projects, it can be easy to stop noticing that.

Could I  live without my wedding china?  The fruit dishes from Jeff's grandmother?  The brown linen chair with the broken leg?  Yes.  Yes.  Yes again.  Some of it I even want to release into the world.

But somehow, parting with the Big House, and the easy stuff (half our possessions, almost), is enough. I'm beginning to feel a sense of loss.  I don't want to lose momentum on this project, so I think I have done Enough.  I will keep my (number withheld) pairs of shoes, my (too many) skirts and dresses, the (not going to admit) books about Virginia Woolf and the Beatles and England, and each of my children's coming-home-from-the-hospital newborn outfits.

But just because I keep those things today doesn't mean I have to make that same decision tomorrow.