By Carrie Jacobson

I have not thought of myself as a consumer.

I do have too many clothes, beautiful clothes that I love, and which are now nearly useless as, after more than two decades of going into a newsroom to work, I no longer have a 9-5 job.

I do have too many painting-related items, too many paintings and too much paint, if there really is such a thing.

I have cut my own personal library down to about 50 books. I have thrown away boxes and boxes and BOXES of mementos, newspaper clippings, stories and novels and essays I’ve written. I have donated clothes and shoes and linen tablecloths. I have given furniture and towels and sheets and rugs and blankets to my daughter. I have left good stuff at the end of the driveway, and passersby have happily taken it home with them.  I have sold my dead mother’s possessions at yard sales, and given them to groups holding yard sales, and wheedled and whined until my siblings and childhood friends took them – and still, when push came to shove, we barely managed to fit most of our stuff into a 26-foot-long moving van.

I sat on the deck and looked at the truck and burst into tears.

“I don’t want to be a person who has this much stuff,” I wailed to my daughter and my husband. They love me and generally don’t think I am crazy, though this episode might have dislodged their certainty a little. “We could burn the truck and still live fine in our new house!” I cried – and of course, I was right. We bought the house furnished, after all.

“What IS all of this stuff?” I cried. “What IS IT?”

At this point, I would like to come right out and say that a lot of it is my husband’s stuff. While I would like to live in a house with a bed and two chairs and a flower arrangement, he would like to have a library stuffed with books, walls rich with paintings and photographs and work rooms with the right materials and plenty of them.

So that is him, and that is his stuff.

I told myself that, this move, I would limit myself to one box of things. You know the things, the things it’s so hard to part with, and the things that are so hard to explain. I tried for one box, and think I ended with three – which is far better than the 10 or so I began with.

In the boxes are letters from my mother and poems my father wrote, and notes from friends and staffers. There’s a magic wand given to me by a friend whose birthday and mine fall on the same day. There’s Oscar the Seal, my favorite stuffed toy, which began life as a gift to my brother, but which, according to my mother, I took instantly, before brother Rand had a chance to see it.

There’s a photograph of me and my long-gone dog Gus, at the top of a mountain in Banff, Canada. There’s my Canadian Ski Instructors Alliance certification pin. There’s the oddly shaped box with my baby hospital bracelet, and another tiny box that holds a pin my grandfather won for working for decades at Dupont.

It was hard to get it down to three boxes. Hard to toss out plaques and awards I won in my years in newspapers. Hard to toss out papers I worked on that reported history. A couple of those papers even made history, and I threw them away, too. It was hard to toss out the paper reporting Mike Levine’s death, but I put it in the recycle bin, and instead, kept a rock from his gravesite.

I threw out notebooks and cracked cups I had treasured. I brought old paintings of mine to Goodwill. I recycled my journalism portfolios, gave a hundred  books to the library, donated my skis. I let go of a lot this time. I faced a lot this time.

This time, in spite of the 26-foot truck, I made a lot of choices and came to grips with a lot of truths. I won’t work in a newspaper again, at least not in any capacity that requires nice clothes. I won’t ski again, at least not to the extent of needing my own skis. I won’t reach out to friends I haven’t thought about in 20 years, though I certainly will never truly forget them.

This move is some sort of defining point in my life, and for once, I am facing up to it, and all the truth it holds.

 

**If you are interested in buying ‘Big Sky,’ please contact me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com

 

Tags: Carrie Jacobson, carriejacobson, moving, oil painting

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