It's just stuff.

            “What were we thinking?” Bill said as we surveyed the contents of the U-Haul truck. “What are we going to do with all this stuff?”

  

            Well, back in June 2011 when we packed up the townhouse in Bradfordwoods, PA, I know what I was thinking… “We’ll need this stuff for our land-based home in Jacksonville. After all, we won’t be living on the boat forever.” Silly me, what was I thinking?

            It’s now clear that we may delay the purchase of a condo long enough that our memory and eyesight will be dim, and it will once again seem like new stuff.

            I honestly thought that we had pared down quite a bit back in Pittsburgh, selling rooms-full of furniture, exercise equipment, tools, books and household goods. Even in a 1,200-square-foot condo, surely we would be able to fit the contents of one bedroom, one study, a dining room, and living room, right?

            Lesson learned during the past two years: I can count on one hand – and still have fingers left over – the number of items that I could have used but managed to make do without. And now that my Mixmaster is finally in the same state, did I bring it back to the boat? Um…no. It’s still in storage because, after all, do I have time to bake? I’ll wait until Christmas to haul it out, dust it off and turn it on…maybe.

            Now, after two eight-hour driving days of a punishing ride (no cruise control, no air conditioning), and another eight hours of wrestling that stuff off the truck and into the double-wide storage unit, we have all our stuff in Jacksonville. (I did not participate in the driving trip, but I hauled my share of boxes from the truck to storage.)

            My husband, being the über-organizer that he is, arranged all the boxes with the labels facing out so that we can more easily get to some of this stuff when we need it. Never mind that we can’t read our own writing on some of the boxes. And there are a couple of mystery boxes with no labeling at all. Oops.

          The empty shelves are for the stuff we have in a small offsite storage unit nearby, which we'll vacate soon. 

          I have four file boxes of my father's sermons...50 years worth. By the time I'm retired with free time to scan and save them, the paper will probably have long crumbled to dust.

          Bill rigged a long pole down the center of the double-wide unit to hang cold weather clothes, for that once a year Christmas trip north.