It’s only stuff

What we carry and what we leave behind

In the past week, I helped my mom move out of her home of 43 years and packed to spend nearly three months in France, so my thoughts have been preoccupied with “stuff.”

Traveling out to Salt Lake City in mid-July wasn’t originally part of the plan. I went out to visit my mom in early June — the earliest I could travel based on my surgeon’s recommendations — to say goodbye to the home I grew up in. Mom surprised her daughters by putting her house on the market in May, after finding an ideal solution to the woes of living alone in an aging home. It was a surprise because she had been understandably resistant to this much change for years after my dad died, but we were all thrilled that she found something she loved.

I was still in the pits of my crutches / indoor cat era when Mom decided to buy a new house, and didn’t learn about it until she’d signed the papers. I thought she didn’t let me in on the process because I was in a delicate mental state at the time. As it turned out, things just moved incredibly quickly. But the truth remains that I probably needed emotional protection in the early stages of the sale. I'm known to be the sentimental one in the family. I hold onto mementos longer than most, and I’ll fight to the end to preserve anything that could be categorized as archives. I rushed out to Utah as soon as I could, just in case the house sold quickly. I bought a plane ticket because the drive was still too strenuous, and dragged my braced leg across the sprawling footprints of Denver and Salt Lake International Airports. I was a little disappointed that Mom had already boxed up the photo albums, but I hobbled through every corner of the house and took dozens of photos. I even discovered a few new-to-me chapters of our family story in the process.

I enjoyed my trip down memory lane, but in the process, I realized that was all that remained — memories. There was nothing left in the house that I felt compelled to take with me. Everything that mattered had already slipped into the past. Shadows and ghosts.

This has been one of my recent life lessons, taught by the increasingly menacing wildfire seasons that now run nearly year-round in Colorado. The question is, “What will I save from the fire?” And the answer today is, “Not much.”

The thought experiment started in 2020 with the three largest wildfires in Colorado history, two burning reasonably close to where I live, and the whole pandemic thing that made it feel like the entire world was burning down. I finally got my act in gear with my evacuation plan and had a long list of what I’d save. I had an overnight go-bag packed and even a separate backpack in case I needed to flee on foot. I kept my medications and personal papers in one spot, and had my favorite mementos — quite a few at the time — and external drives stored in a single bin. I’ve since moved most of this digital stuff to the cloud, but I still have bins full of old journals and photos that I’d also resolved to save, at least back then. After that came the bikes, if I had time to grab them and stuff them in our cars. There were other things near the bottom of my checklist: Favorite pants. Down parkas. Sleeping bags. Other lesser mementos. My list required the use of both our Subarus, so I presumed Beat and I would be evacuating separately, to save our crap.

The years kept coming. 2021, when I lost my dad. 2022, when my mental health took a nosedive. 23 and 24, more fires, more wars, more losses that we all experienced on the grand scale. 25, losing my friend Betsy to the rapid deterioration of brain cancer. 26 has demonstrated on a viscerally personal level that health and vitality are fragile and fleeting, never to be taken for granted. Each year, I make a new "go list.” Each year, it grows shorter.

My fire-safe items now occupy a single grocery bag. They include a few papers that are annoying but not impossible to replace, like my birth certificate and various IDs. A few of my favorite high school sketches. A few silly but hard-to-let-go ego-boosters, like the belt buckles I’ve received for completing 100-mile foot races. The rocks Beat carried on long runs to give to me when he first asked me out, and again 10 years later when we finally got engaged. My stuffed Iditarod husky Bernadette. My dad’s hiking hat. His favorite day-glo T-Shirt. Some of his maps.

Everything else — and I realize there is a lot of privilege in saying this — but now that I’ve had six 2020s summers to think about it, there’s nothing else. The fire can have the rest.

It was interesting to take this mentality into the physical relocation of my mom and her 43 years of accumulation and memories. I try not to judge. We all have our “things,” so who am I to judge what matters to you? What mattered a whole lot to 2020 me does not hit the same with 2026 me, so I realize this is all just part of a life filled with change. But moving Mom was hard. At times it felt like picking up a burden that wasn’t mine and carrying it on my still-tender knee through the 100-degree heat for hours and days. Not that I did a lot of the physical moving. Mom hired movers, and my fully healthy weightlifting sister did the lion’s share of the specialized muscle work. But we all had to put in long days, one more than 14 hours, to manage it all. And there was an emotional heaviness that was difficult to carry — not in the leaving behind, but the holding on. I brought my bike to Utah and used it to do physically exhausting rides — long climbs up the steep grades of Butterfield Canyon during the hottest hours of the afternoon — just to let go.

My youngest sister flew out from California for the final goodbye, after which we locked the house and turned over the key on Sunday. We again wandered through every corner of the house, sharing our memories. It was so much more satisfying than going through the ritual alone, as I did in June. This alone was worth the trip — spending a beautiful day with my sisters and Mom, bidding goodbye to the house that served us so well, and “visiting” Dad at his memorial bench on the Peakview Trail. He even whipped up a nice breeze, which, despite the full sun exposure of the bench, felt like a brief respite from the July heat wave. We savored it. It’s strange that we’re never going back to the house, but also, it feels like it’s time.

The timing of Mom’s move meant I had to make an extremely quick turnover for our summer trip to France and Switzerland, just one day at home before it was time to go again. This has also been an odd shift from the extreme homeboundedness I’ve been stuck in since I injured my knee in February. Just three months ago I was unable to go up and down stairs, and now I’m hopping continents. Life is a strange ride indeed.

My packing was haphazard, but I figured I didn’t need to be too precise. What do you even need for three months of decompression in a place where all I want to do, all I need to do, is move and breathe? Not much. But I was allowed two suitcases, so I filled them. I still had the stuff I left here last summer. I had already packed a duffel for a planned trip here just days before I injured myself in February. The duffel was still packed when Beat came out here in June, so I sent most of it with him, snowshoes, winter coats, and all. And I completely forgot about another suitcase I sent with him when he was here in February. Today, I spent the morning unpacking it all — redundancies of everything, stuff I don’t need, stuff I managed to completely forget I even owned after mere months, so much stuff. I’m halfway around the world, and I’m still holding onto so much crap. Why?

I didn’t have answers for that, so instead I pumped up the tires on a mountain bike that has gathered dust for far too long and set out for a jet-lagged ride on a hot, humid afternoon. Again, my body shed all the heaviness in a stream of sweat as I looked at my surroundings with amazement. The heights of gratitude. How simple my life is. How free I am. I just need to let go.