The Packing Has Begun (and a musical treat)

Sometimes, music says what we can't..or won't..
And it almost always does a better job than we ever could.

Dead Hearts -- Stars
How gorgeous is this little song?
Chuck (seriously an awesome show. always) never fails to surprise & delight me with their soundtrack choices...

My weekend was productive. I began the packing process. And with packing comes every form of procrastination known to man...

Saturday morning I packed up the kitchen. well, all except the food...and the fridge... and the crock pot, which is just too big to fit in a box. And my coffeemaker and stand mixer, which I use pretty much every day. But other than that? Kitchen is packed and we're eating off paper plates & plastic ware, which is lovely in that the only dishes I'm doing are the one pot & one skillet I also didn't pack. oh. and my foreman grill. I didn't pack that either. Wait. What IS in those six boxes of kitchen miscellany in my foyer?

Saturday night packing entailed rifling through junk drawers and cleaning off bookshelves. I officially no longer have a drawer that I can't even open because it's filled to bursting with8 cap-less pens, broken pencils, random flower-shaped erasers, broken birthday candles, half-used packs of matches, old batteries, expired tylenol, packets of soy sauce, pennies, melted starlight mints, hair ties & barrettes (do I really need to go on here? I think not.) It was cathartic & empowering and represented such a small surface area that it doesn't hardly even count as packing. But it's done nonetheless.

In the midst of packing the bookshelves up I came across a treasure trove of baby books and old photo albums from awkward life stages, and ticket stubs and old playbills. And so, all restless energy spent earlier on the junk drawer (and perhaps on singing & dancing in my pajamas to David Bowie & Labyrinth) I spent the wee insomniatic hours of Sunday Morning with warm cups of coffee and memory lane. It was an indulgence I rarely allow myself. And more than a few tears were shed over the detritus of life that seems to reside in scrap books and photo albums.

This a big move for the Munchkins & I. We've been in the same house for over six years.

This house saw me through the birth of two of my three children, a marriage, a divorce, six Christmas mornings, six Halloween nights. First haircuts, first days of school, first lost teeth. And I get overly maudlin about this sort of thing anyway... so despite the fact that this, too, did not exactly count as packing, I feel like in cleaning out the bookshelves I paid a bit of tribute to the old house, the old life. And this too, is an important step in packing. It's funny how clearing out old things can open up so much more room in your life for the new.