Message #20475

[Shannon]

I used to have a much stronger attachments to material possessions - not regular things like goods for comfort, but emotional things like letters, objects people had given me but who had since died, etc.  When I moved to France, I had to let go of a housefull of objects.  40 boxes of books!  All my kitchen gadgets (I love to cook).  Almost all the furniture, the car, the home itself.  I threw out a box of letters that was the entire correspondence between a childhood friend and I over ten years.  Handwritten letters - on paper, with postage no less!  It was like a time capsul.  Family photo albums, journals.  I let it all go.  It was ... liberating.  I kept just enough, I think.  for instance, I could not part with an antique highchair in which every baby in my family has sat in since 6 generations.  That highchair traveled across the USA in an actual wagon train during the piomeer days. It was the one thing my great grandmother left specifically for me, and she made a point to say that it must never be stripped, sanded or refinished.  She was my most favorite person through all my formative years, and I hers.  Why not strip it?  Because I was the last person to sit in it during her tenure, and the ugly black paint that covers it is a physical link between us.  That chair came from Ireland, went across the USA - back over to Europe with me, and now sits in my bedroom here in Miami.  What was I saying about being less attached?  Lol!