Heirlooms

We have spent the last several weekends going over to my parents’ house in O’Fallon and going through everything we find there to see if there is anything worth keeping. Certainly there are plenty of things, like photo albums and books and other mementos, but I am somewhat surprised that there isn’t more. We have brought home three truckloads of boxes so far and it is getting hard to walk in the basement. But I guess it could have been a lot worse.

Much of what is over there has virtually no sentimental value to me because they are not things I grew up with and there aren’t really any memories attached to it. Most of the furniture is antiques that they bought once they lived there, and I’m not the type to be interested in kitchenware, or most of the other knick-knacks that my mom collected. Even the Christmas stuff doesn’t mean that much to me because it was all bought between 2000 and now, and we haven’t spent that many Christmases over there.

I arranged to move my grandpa’s organ out of the house and Gary and Linda (thankfully) agreed to store it in their basement. Maybe the kids will have an opportunity to play it when they are over there. Or maybe we will just end up selling it one day. I don’t know, but I if they hadn’t offered up the storage space, I know I wouldn’t have kept it. There are a number of things I was glad I found; my mom’s painting of the nighttime scene with the moon over the lake, the stereo-opticon, and the big red box of Burmeister family photos. But, now it’s up to the auction company to clean the place out so we can get it on the market.