Cathartic clearing out

So it's all change today. I woke up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, am spending the day in Manhattan moving, and will go to sleep in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Not exactly what I had planned for the weekend.

But there's always a silver lining: I get to stay with two of my great friends from London and their dog Max. Their house is near the beach, they are letting me bring my bike, and I get to explore a different part of the East Coast. I just wish that moving house didn't always involve lugging cases up & down umpteen flights of stairs. This time tho, I have GG &Y who are arriving shortly to help move the heavy stuff into their SUV and thence to storage.

I've already done one trip this morning on my bike to the storage facility, narrowly escaping death on the mean streets of Chelsea when one of the several bags I suspended from the handlebars got caught in the wheel spokes & I came to an abrupt halt.

I spent an hour or so in the container, going through my cases & boxes, primarily hunting for my father's birthday present which seems to have escaped, but also going through everything.

One of the frustrations of living in New York is the sharp divide between the seasons. The winter is so wretched & cold, and the summer so steamy & hot that you require two completely separate wardrobes: furs, cashmere, scarves, boots as opposed to shorts, thin silk dresses & paperweight sandals. So I have two huge bags just filled with winter stuff in there as well as a case of winter shoes.

Or I did until this morning. There's stuff in those bags that's moved from London to New York, gets unpacked every September, hangs untouched in my wardrobe for six months and then gets packed up again. So I grabbed everything I haven't worn for two seasons and put it aside for The Salvation Army. As well as binning two bags of old underwear, & fifteen or so pairs of shoes that really were beyond the ministrations of a cobbler.

I cannot tell you the joy of getting rid of things. I am such a squirrel and I need to learn not to hoard unnecessarily. This was a very good step in the right direction.