Tidying Up

My husband and I are putting things away.  The moving van arrived last Thursday, the movers carried our possessions up to the third floor, gallantly accepting that some very heavy items would not fit onto the elevator. When I arrived from New York passageways had been created through the boxes of books piled high, the fifty paintings in their bubble wrap stacked carefully against walls and other boxes, boxes of kitchen utensils, . . . I could go on.  Why did we bring so many things? And yet all we seemed to be doing in the last two months was making daily trips to Goodwill or inviting our neighbors to help themselves to stacks of unwanted stuff on the porch.  Nothing is more obvious at my advanced age that I will not need or use most of the things I felt I just had to have with me, those little pouches, for instance, I always used to travel with, well, now I guess it was forty years ago.  What do you suppose I put into them?  Some very special books, Cavafey's poems in Greek, for instance, that I used to haltingly translate in the company of a Greek friend each of us lying full length on two sofas in my living room, talk about sybaritic learning!, but could I even begin to do that now?  Poems go on the shelf next to a very special anthropological study of the Maya I was so enthusiastic about when I was in Mexico learning Spanish and promised myself that I would devour.  Let's see that was in 2000. Why was, is, damn it!, this book so important to me?  I am growing afraid to bring out the successive volumes from these boxes, so many dreams, so many hopes.  Why when packing did I anticipate this bright future whereas in the unpacking I have the more than sinking feeling that it is all an exercise in futility.  The bright spot of the last two days has been hanging the paintings, both for the pleasure of the new arrangements, and for the extraordinarily harmonious way in which my husband and I have each played our parts, he using his level, the hammer and nails, me standing back and squinting, making those minute aesthetic adjustments that I alone seem to notice.  Now I have to find a place for the fifty or so framed photographs of everyone who has meant something to me.  There must be some wall space left . . . my bathroom, for instance.  Do I want to stare at my parents when they were in their twenties while I am brushing my teeth, or, no, not that?  My husband is taking me to Europe when this is all done.  He promises we will be completely unpacked in another week.  He recently handed me approximately one hundred large size envelopes to set in my desk drawer. He who does the books for our household, and was once a school assistant superintendent buys office supplies in gross lots. I use maybe perhaps five envelopes a year.