I Am An Unpacker - Revisiting the Past

I wonder if it is true that just before you die, your life passes in front of you.  I feel like I have had a preview of that during the past two weeks.  I have been unpacking…picking up, unwrapping, holding in my hands, pausing, and remembering.   

I realize that when you move there are two moments of purging:  when I am packing items and I ask myself, “Do I really need this anymore?”; and when I am unpacking and I ask myself, “Why did I pack this? Do I really need this anymore?” In either case, if the answer is “No” it usually goes into the Goodwill pile.

However… there are times when the answer is “no” but it does not go to Goodwill. I will hold it in my hands and recall a memory associated with the item.  For that moment I am in the past, reliving an event, the people present, the words shared, the emotions and I realize that this is more than an item…it is a part of my life.

Like the orange squeezer. 

Do I use it?  No.  I have a nifty modern squeezer that is much easier to use and squeezes the juice right into the container I want to use.  Will I ever use it? Probably not. 

 

However…when I pick it up and hold it, I am in the kitchen at 1034 Merydith St. in Kent, Ohio…I am about 8 years old, watching my mother cut and squeeze some wonderful oranges that came "all the way from California" for some fresh juice for us to enjoy.  Will it go to Goodwill?  Not during my lifetime.

And what about my container of rocks?  When Jay and I married, my children gave us this decorative candle stand for our living room.  We looked at it and wondered what to do with it.  Neither of us liked burning candles but it was a gift from my children!  We decided it could hold other things besides candles…it could hold rocks.   

 

We had started a little tradition of picking up a small rock whenever we were on a trip or someplace special and bringing that piece of the world home with us.  We label it with the date and the location and place it in the glass bowl.   

As I unpacked these rocks and replaced them into the bowl, I relived so many special moment.  There was the rock that I took from my cousin, Salvatore’s, rock wall surrounding his olive grove in Ferla, Sicily where we helped him pick olives in 2004.  I held it and I remembered. 

 

There was the rock from Cefalu, Sicily from the piazza where Jay and I first exchanged our marriage vows.  There was the rock from MIT in Boston, from when we attended Jay’s 50^th reunion.  There were the rocks from Macomb, IL and Kent, OH where we showed each other our childhood homes.  There was a rock from Sedona, AZ where Milli and I spent a “mother-daughter getaway” together.  There was the rock from the Yangzi River in China when we visited a tiny village while traversing through 3 Gorges Dam. Each rock gifting me with a memory and an emotion…reminding me of all the precious places, people and times in my life.  They may look like rocks to others, but they are gemstones to me.

So I guess that if in the moments before I breathe my last breath, my life passes before me, it will truly be a rerun, because I can experience scenes from my life anytime I want.  All I have to do is pick up items in my home.