What a week! We spent several days deciding what we were not taking, what we were taking and what we were going to try and sell and what we thought we should give away. Then we had our first foray into selling things on Craigslist – what a great sociological experiment! On one hand people will try to talk you down to next to nothing and on the other they will use stupid amounts of time and gas to chase down a deal.

For the next part of the purge, the adult children were charged with finally going through the boxes of crap in their closets. While we’ve only been in this house for eight years, we moved from a smaller house into a bigger house on the last move so there was no reason to clear things out. Therefore they had an accumulation of personal items both valuable and not so valuable from the entire duration of their lives. It was fascinating listening to the exclamations as they discovered a new thing that they hadn’t seen for years. A journal from our sabbatical trip, a favorite stuffed animal, all those science fair medals. Then came the painful decision of whether or not it should be kept. Given that the house we are moving into is much smaller than the house we are leaving I had to repeatedly remind them that we couldn’t keep all of their stuff indefinitely.

Then came the packing. Luckily we didn’t have to actually do it as we had professional packers come in and do it for us: two people, two days, 172 boxes. We did have to corral all the stuff that wasn’t going with us which led to three carloads worth of donations to the Salvation Army: clothes; more than 200 books, and everything else that wasn’t going to go in a box. (By the third trip, I was hearing comments like “back again?”)

And the final stage: loading the truck. One empty eighteen wheeler, five guys, hundreds of blankets and rolls of tape, 223 tagged items besides the boxes, and seven hours of schlepping and hauling led to a truck that was 2/3 full and a house that was completely empty.

With a carload of stuff that the movers wouldn’t take – including a dozen open bottles of single malt – we pulled out of the driveway for the last time. I can’t say goodbye; it’s too final. But it is time for a new adventure so I’ll say “until we meet again my friends.”