The big move

It’s finally happening. The big move. By the time this column sees print, I should be ensconced in my new home, looking for space to put in stuff I thought I couldn’t live without.

It has been an excruciatingly painful month looking for a house to move to, and after finally finding one that meets at least 70 per cent of my specifications, choosing what stuff I have accumulated over the past 19 years to keep, what to give away, what to donate, and what to throw away.

They don’t make townhouses like they used to. The new place has space for a rectangular or oval table so my antique round table for eight will have to go.  My queen-sized bed — I haven’t slept in anything smaller for 48 years — will not fit in my new room and will have to be replaced with a double for which I don’t have any fitted sheets! And my large bookshelf will just have to grace another person’s home.

I have tons of books I have loved from half a century back, many of which have blackened edges and discolored and flakey pages. With a heavy heart, I have parted with maybe half of my collection, and donated them to the Christian brothers and various other groups that help libraries all over the country.  I have had to throw away the really old volumes that fell apart when I opened them. What I’m keeping are my coffee table books on art, photography, Filipiniana, EDSA, those hard-to-replace volumes that are worth much more now than what I originally paid for decades ago.

When I thought I was done with the books and could now begin to clear my files, more books would emerge from the many nooks and crannies of the house. I wonder why I hung on to them after I‘d read them, when they could have been passed on for others to enjoy. For isn’t that the very reason for their existence?

My files include reams of paper containing minutes of meetings, speeches delivered at conventions, workshop notes, utility bills and receipts from ages past, income tax returns from the Sixties and Seventies, first drafts and false starts, clippings of my columns, dozens of reporters’ notebooks I will never go back to again, and letters, lots of letters dating back to my college years. I cannot imagine why I have kept them this long. The letters I am keeping but I am told we can earn a small fortune selling my files by the kilo.

But I do have documents that I want to preserve. Serendipitously, the Ateneo Library of Women’s Works (ALIWW) provides space for women writers to store manuscripts and memorabilia for posterity. Thank you, ALIWW. I will see you with my stash in June.

I found old suitcases filled with bags and clothes I had long discarded. There were also boxes of 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles the family enjoyed working on when the kids were young, Christmas decor we’d stopped using for maybe a decade, clunky cameras now replaced by cellphones, and a VHS player that stopped playing around 10 years ago.

Well, they are now history. I have been heartless in getting rid of them, but not for good. Last Thursday, Caritas Manila came to pick them up, to be recycled, sold or distributed to the needy. Thank you, Caritas, for taking my still useful junk.

My most precious possessions are family pictures that fit into two large plastic boxes, and letters — thousands of them from my mother, my siblings, classmates, even old beaus who, if they’re reading this, might be breaking into a sweat imagining what they could have written when we were young and foolish.  How could they ever have guessed that I would be a pack rat?

I also have an inordinate attachment to my children’s early notes expressing love, hurt, joy, anger, their plans and ambitions, and their innocent drawings. I have gone through them and taken pictures of their most precious creations with my cellphone, but there are still a lot I cannot throw away.

Then there is the kitchen with its mismatched plates, bowls, cutlery, glasses, pots and pans, plastic containers, gadgets and utensils, baking paraphernalia, and small and large appliances. How could I have accumulated so much?

I know even now that not everything I’ve retained will fit in the new place.  I will be forever culling dispensable stuff from my sentimental junk. The drawings, pictures and letters can be digitized in time. But more of my books will have to go.

It has been a slow sentimental journey going through my possessions and I am floating in memories of the foibles of youth, the joy of a big loving family, true friends, falling in love, having children and later grandchildren, the rewards of my career as a journalist and editor, triumphs and losses of adulthood, political realities and the endless demands of citizenship and patriotism.

No one I know is interested in my junk, except sentimental old me. Perhaps after I’m gone, someone will do what I am not able to and just get rid of it all.  But for now, I am a sentimental turtle who wears my heart on my sleeve and carries my house on my back.