De-personalized

I've recently read several articles on "depersonalizing" your home before selling it--the object being to let potential buyers imagine their own belongings in your home. They are supposed to be able to focus on your home, not your possessions.

Although I've been working on this for several weeks, yesterday was the big day to remove final portraits from the wall, including my favorite pictures of the girls in the entryway.

It made me really sad and I felt emotional all day long. Obviously, the personal things are what make our house our home and packing these things away make it feel so, well, depersonalized. Even though it's still our home, I can feel the tide turning toward a time when it will no longer be ours.
Many of you have asked about our progress. We are meeting with a couple of different realtors tomorrow and hope to have our house listed within the next 7-10 days. We are all decluttered and are working on painting touch-ups and last minute cleaning. I'm wondering if anyone would even notice if we abandoned our recently acquired storage unit and everything in it. In some ways, this feels like a much simpler way to live (without all our stuff).

A Moment of Loveliness

I noted this today in the book I'm reading--Gilead by Marilynne Robinson--as an old, dying father writes a memoir to his young son.

"I wish I could give you the memory I have of your mother that day. I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve."

I had one of those lovely mortal moments the other night when Bea snuck into our bed in the middle of the night. She quickly fell asleep nestled between Rob and me, and I was drifting off again, when suddenly Bea began to laugh in her sleep. It was a prolonged giggle of pure joy. I stayed awake a while longer, hoping to hear it again and wondering what in her dreams could make her laugh with such unrestrained delight. I will never know what tickled her so in her sleep, but I'm so glad I was there to hear it; a "gracious reprieve" indeed.