Gotta have a dip-tet

Monday continued the process of readying ourselves for the trip home on Thursday. It began with a trip to a local HEB where a kind pharmacist updated our tetanus shots. Not as painful as I remember, although my arm is still a bit sore. Then it was the painful process of assigning a value to everything I own. At least now I know where all my money has gone over the years.

It is a difficult process to describe, making a list of everything — absolutely everything — in your house and then assigning a replacement value to it. How do you put a value on Christmas ornaments that have been in your family since childhood? How do you value the trumpet your grandfather played? How do you value the piano on which you learned to play? How do you value albums and boxes of photos from family vacations, friends, important life events? How do you value the original artwork done by family and friends? It’s impossible to attribute a value to everything in my house. But I’ve done what I could. And each day I seem to remember something else.

Little things I see will spark a memory of something in my house that I realize is now gone. Today, it was the Shel Silverstein book “The Giving Tree” that I saw in a shop in Comfort. I realized all of my favorite books are gone. My childhood copies of Dr. Seuss classics. My Beatrix Potter miniatures. My favorite book of nursery rhymes. My Shel Silverstein books. Almost all of them I pull off the shelf from time to time to read and feel better about life.

Then I saw a trumpet for sale in a shop and it hit me – my trumpet and my grandfather’s trumpet were in the garage that took about 6 feet of water. Granted, I haven’t played either in years, but the idea of losing them is heartbreaking to me. I had to leave the shop. I keep thinking of things. The shirt my mother embroidered for me as a child that I still have. My favorite childhood quilt. The dress I wore home from the hospital. Original photos of my grandmother. Not stuff of great monetary value, but of extreme sentimental value to me.

A friend and I were talking the other day and it helped me realize why this is so painful. I’m such a sentimentalist. I keep so many little things that remind of good times in my life. I will always have my memories of the events of my life; I know this. But it’s the loss of all those little everyday symbols of those memories that is painful. Things that connected me to my past. Things that made me feel part of the bigger picture, things that connected me to the world around me.

Perhaps this is lesson I take from all of this. Those symbols are just that – I do not need them to remember the family trip to Pittsburgh with my Gram, or the trip to Florida and the Ringling Bros. winter home. None of that is what makes my memories worthwhile. They are merely trinkets of a lifetime of experiences. Perhaps I will take this opportunity to declutter my life and collect more memories instead of stuff. It’s the only thing I can’t lose.

Coming tomorrow...printing pictures of my house before Ike hit and packing the car for the long drive home