This week, I thought I would revisit an older post about home. But as I sat with it, I realized the truer story is the one unfolding now: boxes, decisions, memories, and the quiet emotional weight of deciding what stays and what goes.
Years ago, my late husband Craig and I built a home on a small mesa in the West. We had very little money, but we had land, imagination, and love. Much of that house was made from reclaimed materials — old bricks from a demolished schoolhouse, rescued windows, pieces of history given new life. It was humble and beautiful, shaped by our own hands.
That home held dreams.
When Craig’s health declined, we left it behind and moved east. Since then, I have moved a few times: into rentals, into a townhouse, into a condo on the bay with my daughter. Each move required letting go. Each one asked me to choose what mattered most.
But this move feels different.
Perhaps it is age. Perhaps it is the uncertainty of not yet knowing where we are going next. Perhaps it is simply that every object I touch now seems to carry a story.
As I wrap family photographs and take artwork off the walls, I find myself overwhelmed in a way I have not before. A book is never just a book. A piece of pottery is not merely decorative. Craig’s Buddha statue, the hand-painted thangkas, the objects gathered over years — they are woven with memory.
My daughter is gentle with me.
“If you’re not ready to let it go,” she says, “we’ll put it in storage for now.”
Her kindness helps.
Still, I find myself asking: Why is this so hard?
Perhaps because letting go of things is rarely about the things themselves. Sometimes what we are really being asked to release is a version of ourselves.
A season of life.
A room once lived in and loved.
Moving, I am discovering, is not simply about relocating belongings. It is about learning how to carry forward what matters, while trusting that home is more than what fills the shelves.And maybe that is enough for now:
to go slowly,
to choose gently,
and to let some decisions wait until the heart is ready.