My daughter and her husband are moving next weekend. As a gift to them, I am sending the last of
her crap with them to their new house.
Turns out she has more stuff here than I thought but much
less than I panicked about: a few boxes, a couple of bins, three mysteriously
tied trash bags, a drink dispenser, some paintings, and a garbage pail with
miscellaneous junk in it. There is also
a table set with four large chairs. All
of it must go by next weekend.
In addition to these treasures, there is one other box, a
box full of file folders and notebooks, that I want her to remove from my
basement. It has been there for a long
time, probably as long as we've been in this home, and somehow it keeps getting
ignored.
Until tonight.
After having some soup, we attack the basement, bringing
things upstairs and packing them into the corner of the den, ready and waiting
for the big move next Saturday. We
decide the table and chairs will have to stay where they are for now because
the den is too small to accommodate that much stuff. Believing that we are done, my daughter is
quite evasive when I point to the paper-filled box of her childhood. Reluctantly the box comes upstairs with us.
Paper after paper after paper is a step into the past. There are the notes never-passed to old
friends and notes never-passed to ex-friends; old essays with teacher
commentary, sketch journals, a middle school yearbook with snarky asides
written in, class notebooks, calendars, photographs, and a list of things to do
before she dies (written when she was in her mid-teens).
The list is by far the best thing found in the box.
Some of the items she already crossed off in high school
because she either did them or decided that the people involved weren't worth
her time and energy. Some of her
aspirations are poignant, like never losing touch with her childhood friend
Rachel (Rachel came to my daughter's wedding last fall). Some are a little scary and harsh, like
wanting to punch a boy (any boy, no one in particular) in the face. She wanted to visit the set of the television
series ER, but since it has been
cancelled, she is a real nurse, an RN who gets to experience the real medical
field every day.
Some of the stuff is a little wackier. For example, she once aspired to own a
hairless cat, or, if unavailable, a hairy cat that has been shaved to look like
a hairless cat. She also thought it
would be truly wonderful to run over a squirrel or chipmunk because her friend
Jayme didn't like them, which totally explains the fur caught in the tire
treads of my late mini-van.
My daughter may be full of a sense of adventure, but she
also has common sense. Some of the stuff
on her teenage-self list make her present-self roll her eyes. "Go
cliff diving? When the hell did I ever
want to go cliff diving? Uhhhh,
no." And it may not be cliff
diving, but there is one massive adventure challenge on her list: Go on the Top Thrill Dragster
roller coaster at Cedar Point, Ohio, without crapping her pants.
I honestly don't know why she would crap
her pants. When it comes to amusement
parks, my kids will ride anything, the higher and the faster the better. Corkscrew coasters? No problem.
Rickety old wooden coasters? Easy
pickings.
My kids all inherited the daredevil
gene. I don't have it, at least not for
amusement parks, but I'm willing to take real-life risks and jump of proverbial
cliffs, and I am hopeful that my daughter at least takes that with her on her
journey into home-owning. Not only am I
sending her crap with her, I'm sending her on her own personal Top Thrill
Dragster of a life moment.
I wish the new home to be everything she has dreamed of, and that
it's as thrilling a ride as she's hoping.
And just an FYI -- there are two bathrooms in her new house, so she
doesn't have to be worried about crapping her pants with excitement.
