Writing Near Hills

We’re getting ready to move these days and I’m learning a lesson I bet lots of people learn when they do this. That lesson is that I have a lot of shit. This shit I have, it’s not actually all that shitty. It’s relatively nice things like an HDTV, or an extra computer (or two). It’s a shelf or two (or ten) of books I like to believe I might read one day. But mostly what it all ends up as is a burden.

It turns out, if you own enough books, you have to figure them into your future housing plans. As in, if you buy enough books, you’re buying a bigger house than you otherwise would. Luckily, we were able to notice that TVs, excess electronics, and even excess books were warping our plans before we bought a house. As a result, we were able to decide to get rid of an awful lot of our stuff, and now we’re moving into a much better neighborhood and smaller house than we expected to at the beginning.

Also, we will now have a few additional benefits. For one, we will live in an urban enough area that we can walk to the grocery, several restaurants, and possibly even downtown if we were ambitious. If we continued our devotion to our stuff, we would be looking at lots and lots of driving.

For another, when we move to our next house we won’t start life there already buried under our possessions. We can take our time and get new stuff and that stuff will be much better suited to the people we are now. In this case, it seems like there’s not enough room for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Our stuff was yesterday and now we have room for today and tomorrow. That sounds like a nice start.