The good news? We have apparently sold our house! I know! We haven't even listed our property yet, but there it is. Our closest neighbors (who are currently renting) are coming over tomorrow night to basically seal the deal. So, I suppose I'm jumping the gun until we actually close. But it looks like our house and land are in the hands of a very lovely couple. Wow! More about them later, because they truly are amazing people. But today is about something else.
The bad news - and I say this with as much love as I can muster - is that we have been invaded. The estate sales company had the first of three staging days. And truly, not knowing what to expect here was a gigantic disadvantage. Five people. Five hours. Suddenly, my house is not my own.
They came. They rearranged. They priced. Everything. They put a price on our lives. This is not a process for the faint of heart, the weak. I thought I could take it. But two hours in, I bailed. I was ready for wine at 4pm. There are no words to describe this. I am literally sitting here, trying to decide how to articulate the reduction of one's LIFE. I have actually seen this from the outside before, when someone passes away, dies. The weekend after my sister's death, I found myself going through her clothes with my mother. "Yes, that I'll take. That should be donated. This, that." It was horrible and sickening, and the only way to get through something like that is not to think about what you're doing. This is similar. I understand now why people in this situation cry over a skirt. I read the blog of another woman, about to set sail with her family, as she wept over a skirt she had to give up. "I could take four, but I wanted five." That is precisely how I feel now. These items, a Christmas ornament here, a wine glass there, are not just things, right? They are memories that tie us to people, to memories, to our lives before today. I was not at all prepared for the moment, even though I had tried, for a company to come in and put a price tag on my life thus far. It was humbling and grating and, quite honestly, painful.
Knowing what I now know, I will do whatever I have to do to distract myself from this reality over the next week. I will have lunch with friends. I will be away from my home, which is soon to be the shell where we once lived. I will look forward. If I could somehow describe the raw emotion I'm feeling tonight, because I know I will want to look back on this eventually, I am not sure I could do it justice. There is a feeling of sadness of course, but there is also a shame - shame, that I allowed these things to have such power. Why do they mean anything at all? They are nothing in the grand scheme. I want to look back on this in a year and be grateful for everything I had to leave behind in order to gain what I have gained. Freedom is more important than a skirt. It may not feel that way today, but I know this to be true. Freedom is the gift I am giving myself. I'm purchasing that gift with the things that have held me. I've loved them and now I will let them go.
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