Giving Up

We hired the neighbor kid to put it all on eBay. He started with the train-set you bought me on a whim, Santa Fe, like the locomotive that pulled me through Navajo country 40 years ago. Now, this HO gathers dust, the cobwebs aren’t to scale. Next we’ll sell that beer stein from the Schwarzwald, the potlatch bowl (Athabascan) from our Alaska days. No room in a smaller house for my mother’s blue willow (so many Thanksgivings) or my dad’s apothecary jars. The Mexican tree of life from Oaxaca. It’s time to downsize. What kind of life, I wonder, without cathedral pines outside the door, and deer sipping from the water trough. My saddle from high school, formed to the back of a black mare sold when I went away to college. Back when I was gathering the clutter of a lifetime, never imagining someday I’d have to leave it.