Your Life, In 12 Boxes

For five-and-a-half years, much of my life here in London has been holed up in a small downstairs home office that measures maybe 150 square feet. There’s a single window that gives me a view of the back garden and the buildings just beyond. The room holds four pieces of furniture: a small day bed with drawers below, a desk with just enough space to hold a laptop and lamp, a small side cabinet beside the desk, and a cheap IKEA chest of drawers about 3 feet tall and maybe 30 inches wide, with three drawers.

The top two drawers of the chest hold clothes. The bottom drawer holds personal items – all the photos, drawings, school assignments, holiday/birthday/anniversary cards, and other stuff given to me by my family these past five-and-a-half years, along with things I’ve collected along the way.

In a couple of weeks, all of these things will either be shipped across the Atlantic, discarded, left behind, or donated to charity. We’ll be saying farewell to London and returning to the States. Now we must decide what to send over, and what not to.

The contents of the bottom drawer – the personal stuff – will be shipped over. That’s the case even though it mostly just lays there, dormant, never seen by human eyes. But I don’t dare toss it out.

Many people are like this. Maybe most people. We hold on to keepsakes. We put them in drawers or boxes or files. We might not look at them once they’ve gotten comfortably put away, but by God, they are there, and there they will stay.

I can’t imagine tossing them out – cards I’ve been given by my family, drawings or stories our daughters created, keepsakes from museums or sporting events. The sheer physical act of sending them on a journey to the municipal recycling center along with the empty cans and jars and cardboard is unthinkable.

So, into the drawer they go, then into the box when the drawer fills up, then into the attic or cellar. But never tossed out. Never discarded. Never, never.

*****

We will be moving from London in less than three weeks. We are currently in the process of boxing everything up to be shipped across the Atlantic. This mainly means boxing up clothes, books, and spare electronics. There is little in the way of furniture, appliances, or cookware to shipped, because our rental home in London came fully furnished.

I’ll be shipping a couple of bicycles, and some tennis gear, and a big, blocky computer printer we didn’t use a single time in London because of the different U.S./UK electrical outlets. That’s also the case with my ginormous, decade-old desktop computer with the oversized screen – it pretty much stayed boxed up the whole time in London, and it will be shipped back to the USA.

The other day my wife Susan counted the boxes in my office, which held just about all my worldly possessions here in London. She counted a dozen boxes. They are mostly small, office-type boxes.

“Your life, in 12 boxes,” she joked.

She marveled that I could fit everything in 12 boxes – clothes, books, electronics, personal items, odds and ends. The other three family members have more.

Our lives, in X boxes….

*****

I have lived a fairly minimalist life over here in terms of possessions. We moved to London in January of 2018 from Charlotte, North Carolina, where we still own a home we rent out. We left quite a bit of stuff back there – furniture, clothes, books, yard equipment, small appliances, kitchenware.

Our original plan was to move back into that house, but those plans got changed, and we are moving to the NYC area instead. We’ll be selling the house in Charlotte and will ship some of the stuff to northern New Jersey, discard some of it, and give the rest away to charity.

Could we live without all our belongings in Charlotte? Obviously, yes – because we’ve been doing so for 5.5 years.

But there are things I want to retrieve. A nice suit and some other nice clothes. A couple thousand vintage baseball cards. A few hundred books. Some old record albums, an ancient stereo system, some furniture pieces, many pieces of art, and assorted other things – including personal items like cards, drawings, letters, etc.

I want them. I don’t need them, but I want them. There are things other family members will want as well, even though we don’t technically need them.

*****

Somewhere in the bowels of our basement back in Charlotte are boxes containing old junior high and high school yearbooks I haven’t looked at in 30 years and may never look at again. Now, why on earth would I haul them around again? I’ve been hauling them around for more than four decades, from home to home and city to city – nearly 30 different homes in more than a dozen different cities in seven states and on two continents.

If I’m being honest, those old yearbooks have little relevance to my life in 2023. They are relics from a distant past that occurred several lifetimes ago. I am no longer the person in the yearbook photos that have my name beside them, and haven’t been in a long, long time.

But, I hold on to those relics. I hold on to letters from people I haven’t seen in decades and never will see again, and whom I would probably not recognize if I passed on the street this very moment. I hold on to schoolwork from when I was a kid, which my mother dutifully kept packed up nice and neat, well into my adulthood, before she handed them over to me. I hold on to clips of newspaper and magazine articles I wrote decades ago, even though they will do me no worldly good anymore.

I will have a decision to make about all this stuff – and sooner rather than later. I have reached the age where mortality is no longer an abstract concept but a very real possibility any given year, month, or day.

There is no reason to clutter the remaining days with items that will never again pass across my eyes. There is every reason to get rid of them. We are all just passing through, our possessions and memories as mortal as our bodies. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Maybe my life should fit into 12 boxes. Probably it should.

But what the hell. An extra couple boxes never hurt anybody…..

Note: The image is of about half my boxes, taken from the home office. My possessions were not necessarily made in China, but the boxes I’m using to pack them in came from there, obviously.