The Perils of Living Small

Let me tell you what I didn't think about when I decided to downsize:  I didn't think about what I would do with the 16 pairs of shoes that don't fit into my closet. I didn't foresee watching my brand-new, full-sized mattress drive away in the back of the delivery truck because the box spring was too large to fit up my staircase. And I definitely did not expect to spend months sifting through old photo albums deciding which pictures could stay and which no longer fit. The photo albums that moved with me to my tiny little house in the city -- more than a dozen of them -- have magnetic pages and plastic sleeves.  They are big and bulky and heavy, and I simply don't have the room to store them safely here.  But that doesn't mean I don't want them. I have given away or sold so much of what defined me in my old life. I've shipped or stowed the things that mattered to my kids, and given everyone an opportunity to keep the things that matter most to them.  But what about the pieces of my past that I can't bear to part with, but don't have room for anymore? These photos chronicle the lives of my children from birth through college graduation. There are pictures of me before I had laugh lines, and pictures of my parents, alive and happy -- and young -- younger than I am now.  I had to hang on to these; I don't want to forget. The solution I came up with is that my ex-husband gets custody of the albums -- but not until I got a chance to go through each of them to choose the pictures that remind me most of the life I loved.  It took months. I spent the summer coming home from work to piles of photos, slowly sifting through albums, picking out the photos that make me smile, and tossing out (or leaving in albums) the doubles, the extraneous, the people who've chosen to ignore me because I chose a different life. It was grueling work, and most evenings, I would cry my way through the pages. But it felt good. Pictures allow you to relive things, and so much of my life has been worth reliving.  In the fall, I handed over the albums to my ex-husband. But under my bed, in six small photo boxes, are the pictures that I've kept to remind me of all that I've accomplished, and all that still remains to be done.  I call them Part I.