Childhood Home For Sale

Recently, my parents put our house on the market so I had to clean out my bedroom. It was not an easy feat, let me tell you! This is the house I grew up in and came home from the hospital in so to say there was a lot to go through would be a complete understatement. After a week in New York, the majority of my current room was trashed or organized into bags and boxes to go up to Cape Cod. Since I finished sorting through my life in high school and my elementary years I can decompress everything and take a step back.

I didn’t realize how emotional putting the house on the market would be until we arrived in New York two weeks ago. I do wish we could up and move the entire house somewhere more convenient but we can’t and the chances of me coming back in the future are very slim. I want to be in Boston and that is the plan. There is very little chance of the plan changing.  Now that I am back in Boston and what I saved from New York will have arrived at our apartment by the time we get back from Puerto Rico I keep thinking about what I found there. There were highlights and among those highlights awkward pre-adolescent and high school photos. I mean REALLY awkward. Those went in the trash but a lot of it did not and I will keep for a long time.

Here are some highlights of things I found while cleaning:

• My 8^th grade yearbook. Boy, is there a lot of funny stuff in there. I don’t know what I was thinking when I went through and marked different pictures with comments. I have no words for 8^th grade me except a big fat WHY.
• My Nesiya swag. The six weeks I spent in Israel with Nesiya, an Israel program for high school students, was unreal.  There were autograph books, diaries and writing I did.
• My Goodbye Book. I had one nanny from birth to age five. The year before she left we put pictures of our five years together into a book. This was the first thing I found after two days of cleaning that made me tear up.
• Two or three quality pieces of art work. I was a decent artist once upon a time in high school. I did save a few pieces of art I made and will even maybe frame them and put them up somewhere.
• My panda bear. When I was a baby I had a massive panda bear that was a staple in all my bedrooms. Needless to say, it is going to be in Boston also. I was always a stuffed animal kid and that was one of my firsts.
• My Beanie Babies. For the longest time before my grandmother died she would bring me Beanie Babies whenever she came to visit. I accumulated at least 100 of them and they are all in a bag to go into storage so I can give them to my kids, basket included!
• My glass animals. I had a great collection of glass animals given to me by a family friend and I can’t wait to put them into my new room somewhere.

I got word on Friday from my dad there are two different people looking at the house today. That is a little unnerving because it feels very real but also exciting. We will all be starting a new stage of our lives once this house is sold. Even my sisters who haven’t lived there since they were in high school have special memories we already talked about. It will be a new era for all of us.