The 20% Rule

This was in our attic.

More accurately, this is part of what was in our attic.

Now that we have sold our home in Tupelo, the packing has started in earnest. While Marlene worked on the guest bedroom, I started hauling things down from the attic. After watching many episodes of “Storage Wars,” I was hopeful of finding something extremely valuable, like maybe a forgotten painting by Rembrandt that we bought at a flea market 30 years ago. Alas, no such luck. Mostly I found winter clothes from our years in Chicago plus the Christmas ornaments plus some pictures plus some stuff we’ve been lugging around for the boys for the last 10 years plus two window fans, a baby’s walker, a glove (yes, one glove, not two), my Dad’s diploma from Northwestern University Medical School in the 1940s, a laptop computer we discarded six years ago, several boxes of tax returns, a lighting set-up for a construction site, a “See Rock City Bird House,” a bike helmet, a trunk-mount bike carrier, some old KBM brochures, a stack of pictures that I can’t quite identify, boxes of letters, articles and other memorabilia, and assorted video cassettes (we got rid of our VCR years ago). 

Some of it (my Dad’s diploma, for instance) has sentimental value to me. Some of it (the tax returns) we need to keep, some of it (the trunk-mounted bike carrier) we might use when we move to Dallas. A lot of it goes into the gray zone, e.g. “Do we need that?” “I don’t think so.” “Maybe we should keep it just in case.” “If we haven’t touched it in ten years, we probably don’t need it.»

They say that you lose/give away/break 20% of what you own each time you move. If I counted correctly, this is the ninth move we’ve made in 38 years. That means we’ve lost 180% of what we started with, which sounds about right. We started losing things on our very first move, when someone robbed our car top carrier on our honeymoon. Two days later the top blew off the carrier while we were driving on the interstate somewhere in West Texas. I was dodging 18 wheelers trying to grab things before they blew away. It’s been like that every time we’ve moved. You give it away or you throw it away or it breaks and then you throw it away. Whatever’s left is what you take with you.

So far the packing is going fairly well, but we haven’t started with the big stuff yet. That comes later, when we’re closer to the move date. For the moment, our garage is filled with things that need to be sorted and stacked. 

But the attic is empty. That’s a good start.