Precious Moments and Precious Memories
When we agents are preparing to sell a home, we often ask the homeowner to remove as many excess belongings as possible from the house. It helps the house show better and helps potential buyers visualize their own stuff, and thereby themselves, in the house. However, parting with our things can be easier said than done and if you’re a sentimental person like me, it can be darn near impossible. Whether we’re moving or not, every once in a while, we need to purge old, unused stuff from our physical space.
At my age (no I’m not telling the number) I have acquired a houseful of things attached to heartfelt memories. Some of it useful some of it not. I have plastic containers full of things that I never look at, never use and probably never will. So its time for some of this stuff to go! But how? I know how to fill a trash bag with junk and put it out on the curb for the garbage collector to pick up. I also know how to fill up the car with lightly worn clothes and drop them off in the Goodwill drive-thru. The Friends of the Library will accept all my old books. Garage sales can be surprisingly lucrative. But what about the precious things attached to precious memories. How do I get rid of that stuff? In my quest to figure this out, I hit the Google and found some good advice in an article written by a woman named Susan.
Susan inherited her mother’s Precious Moments collection. She never shared her mom’s interest in the little figurines, but her mom loved them so Susan kept them….. in a box in a closet. Years later, an old friend asked Susan about whatever became of her mom’s extensive collection. The friend was surprised to learn that Susan still had them but had them all boxed up and not on display. The friend suggested that Susan give them away or sell them to another collector with the idea that perhaps honoring Mom meant placing her collection in the hands of someone who shared her passion and not keeping them in a box in the dark. This was a breakthrough for Susan and she did just that. She found a lady who is a Precious Moments fanatic, just like her mom and decided to let them go. But, before she gave them away, she did a really smart thing. She photographed each of the figurines and made a special photo album for the pictures. Sometimes when she misses her mom, Susan looks at the pictures and remembers how happy those little figurines made her mother. She knows that her mother would approve of her decision to take the Precious Moments out of the closet and give them to someone who displays them proudly and loves them as much as Mom did.
The take away for me, is that our things are not our memories. Certain items might trigger a happy memory, but the precious moments from our lives reside in our hearts not our things. And if a pictures’ worth a thousand words then its certainly worth at least one heartfelt memory.
I have a lot of stuff that I should let go of. I’m going to try Susan’s “take a photo then send it out the door” method. Wish me luck!
Additional Info
- Published in Oahu
