Day 2349: If I have learned one thing as a sailor's wife, it us the shocking fact that you will move, and you best learn to like it or at least make the best of it. With each place comes new adventure and being the girl that was going to move just down the street from my parents, it is always something new.
Each new duty station come with the packing and unpacking and repacking and refusal to do anything related to packing. I'll go ahead and be honest, we have been at our current duty station for over a year, and I still haven't finished unpacking! Why, do you ask? Well that's a great question. The answer is because I have learned that I don't need all the things I have. Sure, the fancy extras and "stuff" as it were, used to be important to me at some point. I mean it surely must have been for me to willingly move it across the country more than once, but why is it important. Most of that stuff I haven't touched or even looked at in years!
But nonetheless, I have grown emotionally attached to my stuff. Each little thing was a reminder of where I have been and how far I have come in my life, be it the out dated textbooks (I can still get some $$ for those!!), or the little scrap of paper I wrote my baby sister's hypothetical names on when my brothers and I helped my parents pick (they went with my choice, but it's not like it was a competition). And some of these things are worth keeping. That scrap of paper still sticks out of the baby name book my darling dear and I keep handy for our random discussions about our eventual offspring. But I can't keep everything. I can't hold onto every little paper, every little gift I was ever given, every small thing that ment something at some point, because that's not what a real memory is.
A memory is the smell of my parents juke box in our play room growing up, or the way I remember my grandmother reading by the window when I got home from school. It's the sound of a crashing plastic ride-on car skidding through our driveway, or the time I hugged my grandpa goodbye knowing I wouldn't see him again. It's the holler of the angry neighbor as my roommate and I built furniture well into the night we moved into our first apartment. It's the laughter from day I met Darling Dear when he thought I was drunk but just realized I'm crazy, or sound of the tears coming from my mother as I moved across the country for the first time. It's the feeling I had when I stood in front of all the important people in my life and stammered to keep Darling Dear as my best friend forever.
It's a feeling, or a smell, or a sound. An experience, not a thing. And though getting rid of the "stuff" is hard, I remind myself that I am making way for new memories and that I am not really letting go of the ones from my past.
