Things I'd Rather Not Consider

Today, my mother came down to go through the storage building behind my house.  There's not much space in it, so only one person can fit between the stacks of stuff at a time.  She was going through to weed out things she knew were old and of no use.  Later on, I'll go through and purge my own stuff.

Most of what was thrown out today goes all the way back to my grandmother and grandfather.  We threw out old empty boxes, broken items, and all those other types of debris that collects in storage spaces.  One of the last things I helped with was pulling down a huge box of my grandmother's clothes that had been put there when I first came to live here and cleaned out the closets.

It's been there for years.  When I moved in, my mother was not able to handle going through all the stuff, so we just boxed and stored it.  Today, she sorted, and although I could tell that she was remembering Granny, she was able to get through it.

Late this afternoon, she called me from home to talk about something, and the stuff in storage came up as a topic.  I was talking about things I plan to move into the empty space that is slowly emerging, and she laughed.  "I don't know who's going to clean all that stuff out when you're gone," she said.  I made some kind of non-committal noise to which she replied, "I guess that's not really your problem at that point, though, is it?"

It's one of two things that hit me hard today.  The other, stupidly enough, was a set of Star Wars onesies from ThinkGeek.  Both of them revolve around the same thing.  I am getting too old to have someone to clean up after me when I'm gone. I'm getting too old to find someone to grow old with.  I'm just getting too old.

Yesterday, in my course readings for Turkey, I read about Evliya Chelebi, a travel writer in the late 17th century.  He considered his life dedicated to wanderlust, wanting to see and record every possible thing.  He deliberately chose not to pursue marriage and a family so he would have every possible opportunity to go.  There are certainly significant benefits to being single and childless - I can pick up and go wherever I wish, whenever I wish, stay as long as I wish (or at least as long as I can afford) - but I'm not sure I really believe that these outweigh the drawbacks.  Who is there to share it all with?  Who can I leave any of it to?

Most of the time, I'm happy.  Most of the time, I'm okay.  (And before I start sounding too much like a Bob Dylan song, I'll quit that.) Just sometimes, just today, though, I'm not.