Opening boxes

I've been tackling my unpacked boxes lately, which has turned out to be a difficult, and emotional, task. You see, while Mr. Speedy and I have been purging our belongings annually, with every move, we've also been lugging a few untouched boxes from address to address.

And, now in our largest living space yet, we're still trying to pare down. Getting bogged down in belongings gets messy. It makes it tough to keep organized, harder to find things, and attracts dust. And, after all, it's really only stuff. 

So, I finally cracked open some of those boxes - whose belongings were last seen way back in '06/'07. The stuff has been slotted into its respective places, along with toss and donate piles, but I'm still ruminating over my finds.

Because, it's not really only stuff. It's a snapshot of who I was two years ago. It's a glimpse into the person who was leaving almost everything she knew to move to Toronto to start a career in journalism.

The bobble-head lobster is a funny reminder of home, and a definite conversation piece.

The stack of political science text books (not all required course reading) remind me of my aspirations towards political reporting.

The student loan statement from May 2007, with its terrifyingly steep numbers (why on Earth did I feel like that needed to be packed?) helped motivate my relocation for work, and my enthusiastic hunt for full-time work (which continues these days with less vigour, more wishing and hoping).

Photos and ticket stubs are a wonderful reminder of the friends I left behind (and still miss), and were easily slotted into folders, frames and albums.

Other things are less concrete reminders. Three koosh ball animals, prizes from some sort of residence carnival night, will hardly come in handy and were instantly destined for the trash. What ever possessed me to pack those so lovingly? Ditto for unlabelled mini-cassette tapes, presumably from student assignments.

Not all of these pieces fit into my new life, and really, they shouldn't. You want to always be moving forward and changing. But cracking open these boxes was like peeking into a time capsule, a reminder of the optimism with which I came to Toronto (little did I know that apartments here wouldn't have room for my full library of books!), and I'm kind of grateful that I left them untouched for so long.

What treasures do you have hiding in boxes?

Comments

[mum-in-law]

Bravo Jennifer for getting to those boxes in almost timely fashion! I am ashamed to say that when we moved out of our family home into our present (smaller) condo townhouse, we threw out the contents of boxes that had been left unpacked in our basement for the 16 or so years we'd been living there! Now we try very hard not to leave anything 'undealt-with' for more than a couple of weeks. Well, we try....