Hendrick Hudson Free Library

Downsizing from four bedrooms to two

Nobody tells you that moving at 70 is 20 percent logistics and 80 percent deciding who you are now. We gave ourselves a year, and the machine earned its keep in the part everyone dreads, the decisions. The inventory first. Room by room, I talked at the program, the cedar chest, the good china for eight, forty years of National Geographic, my mother's piano that nobody plays, and asked for it organized into keep, family, sell, donate, and hard calls, with a deadline attached to each hard call. Hard calls got their own evenings. Tell me about the psychology of the piano, I said, honestly, and it said things about identity and inheritance that a son would have hedged and a friend would have rushed, and the piano went to a family with an eleven year old, which is where pianos belong. The selling became its own project, each item photographed, and the program drafting the marketplace listings, honest and appealing, the china described so someone who loves it finds it. What sold in a weekend garage sale used to take a summer. What I was not prepared for was the emotional load, and the machine handled that too, in its flat, steady, surprisingly useful way, because you can say anything to it, at midnight, about your mother's spoons, and it answers calmly and keeps nothing. We moved in April. Two bedrooms, one storage unit we did not need, and a year that could have broken us, organized instead. The house is smaller. The load is too.

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