Skip to main content

Packing In Case of Fire

As I may have mentioned, my mother will be moving in with one of my sisters soon, and she'll be leaving behind a house full of stuff. She isn't in a position of having to clear out immediately because we have a plan—we'll leave her house largely intact, and my sister's church will rent it occasionally for missionaries who are home on leave. When missionary families come back to the States after living in another country, they need a place to live for a few months or even a year, and people rent them their furnished houses.

Anyway, we're not scrambling to close the place down right away, but my mother is in the process of choosing what she'll take to fill the rooms at my sister's house. She'll have a bedroom and a sitting room where she can hide out and watch TV or just take a nap, if she wants to get away from the common rooms, and she wants to make those private spaces as much like home s she can.

Here is today's column in Small Town Newspaper in response to that process.

Comments

savannah said…
perfect! i know that feeling exactly, but only because i've moved so many times. there are very few things that have made the cut, so to speak, with each move. most of the things in this house are enjoyed by us now, but if gone tomorrow, there would be no tears shed. xoxox
Alifan said…
Another great piece of writing Robyn, I am always trying to de clutter, but somehow all the memories seem to come flooding back and the item stays where it is.

I have just discarded hopefully for recycling, a few years christmas and birthday cards, which have been in the shed for ages, but of course have kept a few of the family ones..oh dear what will the boys keep when I am no longer here, maybe I had better try and weed out a few more things..certainly the charity shops will be having a field day, but they say one mans rubbish will deilght someone else, so here goes..........

Good luck to Mum in her new home.

Popular posts from this blog

No More Mr. Nice Guy

It's good to be a nice person--to say nice things, to do nice things, to write nice things--but I declare an end to the use of the word nice. Nice is what you say when you can't think of any other adjective. Someone shows you a picture of their back yard--that's nice. Someone tells you about their afternoon adventure--that's nice. Or someone describes their childhood in great detail and sometimes with painstaking effort--that's nice. It's a lazy word, and it's non-descriptive. Nice is like mashed potatoes with noodles and chicken gravy all in a big pile on one plate with some canned corn for garnish. Everything is the same color and texture and base substance--starch (this is a favorite Amish dish). Nice is like a partly cloudy day in April when outside feels like inside, and you can't tell a difference between the lighting and the temperature of your living room and the lighting and temperature of your front yard. Nice is a glass of lukewarm water. ...

Ish People

Tell an Ish person to show up around 9 a.m., and you'll see them somewhere around 9 a.m. Tell them to show up at 9ish, and you'll see them anywhere from 9:05 to 9:20. You have given them license to dilly dally, and who wouldn't take advantage of that? The other night at the big shindig dinner party, one of the drummers said the rehearsal the next morning would begin at 9ish. "I am an ish person," he says. Immediately the clanker goes off in my head--oh, good, I thought. I can deliver my daughter a little late. No Ish person is early, so if you say 9ish, that does not mean give or take 5, 10, 15 minutes. It's exclusively a taking phrase. Take an extra 10 minutes to drink your cup of coffee. We won't mind. We're Ish people. Sunday's rehearsal started at 2:00. Because it was conducted by the same people who conducted the Saturday rehearsal, my understanding was 2-ISH. My daughter is worse than I am about taking liberties with Ish time frames, so she d...

Long Live Anita Bowser

You know I occasionally check my hometown newspaper's website to scan the obituaries (morbid, I know, but I'm at that age). Over this past weekend, I read the obituary of Indiana State Senator Anita Bowser . She was a noted Democrat who championed causes protecting the neediest in the state's population. She was respected on both sides of the aisle for her intelligence and plain and outspoken approach to law making. The picture on her senate page is lovely. I remember none of those things about Anita Bowser . My first year or so in college was spent at a branch of Purdue University, and in the early 80s, Anita was a political science professor. She taught my American Government class my freshman year, and she was a mess. Somewhere in my old text book, I have a sketch of her drawn on a particularly dull day in class--her hose sagged at her ankles, her slip showed at least half an inch all the way around, her hair had been slept on but not brushed, and her bright red lip stic...