My Weekend Excursion

I went home to SC this past weekend to see my baby brother graduate high school. He's the last of the three of us, and is nine years younger than me. He was pretty excited (as he should be), and is looking forward to college in the fall.

Because my parents are getting ready to move (hopefully for the last time) to the farm that belonged to my grandparents, they have been faced with the task of combining two (large) houses worth of stuff into one. Thus, one of my tasks while I was at home was to go through my room, figure out what I really wanted to keep, and separate the rest to be given away to friends, donated, trashed, etc.

Truth be told, I really didn't have all that much left at my parents house. I haven't really lived in their house since high school (two moves ago for them), and I moved almost all of my books, clothes, personal items, furniture to Nashville when I graduated college. That being said, I was surprised at how much stuff I still had there.

Among the odds and ends, a few things I found:

• my notes from AP calculus....taken my senior year in high school
• lots of dolls (maybe that makes me weird, but I have an aunt who used to send me dolls, and I loved playing with them when I was a kid)
• love letters from my high school boyfriend
• all the cards I got for my high school graduation
• every solo/ensemble adjudication sheet, music award, recital program and school award I ever got
• a few evening gowns, a foxtail cape (that was my grandmothers), various other formalwear

Now, remember how I said I hadn't really lived in my parents house since high school? We moved two weeks after I graduated, and I guess I never had a chance to go through my stuff. Then, it all got moved again when my parents moved after my freshman year in college.

In the end, I brought home a desk (for the music room, particularly needed since I will be full time in grad school in the fall), all the dresses and formal coats, a few books, sewing patterns, some art that I had stashed away there and a few other odds and ends. I left three small boxes of stuff that I can get next time I go to visit.

Maybe I'm weird, but this task didn't draw up strong emotions for me. I guess I've moved so many times that I don't have any strong attachment to the house itself, and since I have my own home now, it seems right to me that my stuff should be in it.

Have you completely cleaned out your room at your parents house? Was it really emotional, or did it just feel like a task that needed to be done?