The Ties That Bind

I've written before about discarding those things which no longer have any meaning to us, if they ever truly did. But before we left the States, we also let go of things that we used, things we loved, things we would have kept if we only felt we could. Things like: 

• Our cars, especially our Mazda MX-5 (Miata). Two-year-old 'Red Sonja' replaced the 1997 model John bought used just a month after we started dating. That's 13 years of top-down driving along winding country roads in New England. In theory, we could have shipped it, but fortunately there are plenty of MX-5s in the UK, and the roads are narrower and twistier (or 'naggery', as one pub denizen described them).
  

  

  With 'Red Sonja'

  
• Our living room set. Almost as young as Red Sonja, and just about as big. We feared our America-sized furniture wouldn't fit into England-sized doors or living rooms. This fear was confirmed when friends told us they had to remove a window to get their American couch into their English house.
• Several hundred books. Maybe we would have reread them all, if we won the lottery and quit our jobs and spent our days reading. As it was, our shelves had become sort of monuments to books we've read. There will be no room in our house for monuments.

Those of our belongings we did ship made it through UK customs this week and are now in temporary storage. Just a few short weeks and we'll all be reunited at the house we will be renting. As we unpack, maybe we'll think, "Why did we keep this?" Or, "We have no room for this".

And then we'll start letting go all over again.