Quote de jour

"Perhaps middle-age is, or should be a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the the ego."
                                                                                                                  ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Are all baby boomers pack rats? If so, is it by design or by default? I think it's a gradual thing. We don't set out at twenty to accumulate 43 steak knives, thousands of books, records, and Cd's and 27 moisturizers in our medicine cabinets. It just happens. We all know whatever is in our closets, multiplies in the dark. Well, at least that's what happens at my house.

I wasn't thinking about the numbers of things when the smoke alarm woke me up at 5 o'clock this morning. I believe in numerology but five is not a lucky number to be woken up at. The first thing I thought of was getting the cats safely out of the house. Their cat carriers though were in the separate garage, fifty feet from the house. The cats remained in bed, unperturbed by the chaos. So much for my delusion of them saving my life one day.

The ear-splitting noise of the alarm did nothing for my cognitive skills. At least my excellent sense of smell launched into a bloodhound-sniffing overdrive. I stumbled from room to room, nose in the air. I didn't detect any smoke but the air in my dressing room was as dense as a Turkish bath. Then, in my middle-aged foggy memory, I remembered turning the valve of a defunct radiator thingy in a fit of re-arranging furniture in the dressing room yesterday. Mystery solved.

I returned to bed but couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about things, like what if all my millions of 'things' went up in smoke. I thought about friends living in the 'inferno' State of California. I finally drifted off to the land of Nod, thinking about selling all my possessions on E-Bay as an act of purification. The tabula rasa of a new life, the ultimate clean slate. But do I have the courage to do it? Every so often I rummage through boxes of stuff and find wonderful things I'd forgotten I had. It's like Christmas in November. Art and knick knacks, antiques, vintage items like an art deco dish, perfect for serving asparagus tonight. But did I really need two? Would I miss them after I sold them? Are my possessions, possessing me? I began making a list of places.
1) E-Bay,
2) I-offer
3) Craig's List
4) ???
A few of my favorite things... for insurance purposes and just maybe for sale.