The past few days I’ve been back in Essex, my sister and I continuing the task of sorting through every item accumulated in the family home over six decades.
An almost impossible quantity of things carefully preserved in every drawer, cupboard, box, filing cabinet, corner, nook and cranny. Some can be easily thrown away, some deserves finding a good home, some is heartbreakingly sentimental, and then lots of, “oh, hmm, what do we do with this?”
As usual I was slightly dreading coming here, backwards to all the memories, in order to be faced with so many tiny decisions over and over again. But within a day I, we, don’t want to leave. Everything is so familiar, so just right, so much part of us and our first half-centuries. How can it be that at some point we’ll no longer be able to s…
The past few days I’ve been back in Essex, my sister and I continuing the task of sorting through every item accumulated in the family home over six decades.
An almost impossible quantity of things carefully preserved in every drawer, cupboard, box, filing cabinet, corner, nook and cranny. Some can be easily thrown away, some deserves finding a good home, some is heartbreakingly sentimental, and then lots of, “oh, hmm, what do we do with this?”
As usual I was slightly dreading coming here, backwards to all the memories, in order to be faced with so many tiny decisions over and over again. But within a day I, we, don’t want to leave. Everything is so familiar, so just right, so much part of us and our first half-centuries. How can it be that at some point we’ll no longer be able to sit in the same chairs in the same rooms and look at all these familiar things?
We’re dismantling lives. Wanting to go back to a couple of years ago. Wishing we could spend another Christmas here in this house where we grew up, in the town where Mum and Dad made their lives, rooting themselves into the history and politics of the place.
So many tears now because of so many happy memories.
§ Back home the builders have nearly finished the garage renovations after four weeks, with a brand new, non-leaking roof, OSB board on the inside walls, new lights and power sockets, and wood cladding on the outside.
The builders were lovely and we were able to be unknowledgably vague about our needs and leave it to them to decide the plan and do a good job. But it will be nice to not have builders around soon.
§ We watched The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025) which was good but I maybe went into it expecting “heist” rather than “Kelly Reichardt” and so was a little disappointed when it didn’t follow a typical, increasingly tense, heist tale but instead decreasing amounts of things happened until it ended.
§ It is tiring, all the sorting. All the bending down, standing up, moving things around, and then the endless stream of decision-making, working out what to do with every individual sheet of paper, etc. But we’ve made visible progress. Still so much to do, for next time.
I might have a break from weeknotes next weekend. We’ll see. Have a good seasonal week or fortnight. Well done, we all made it.