The Things We Left Behind

Sometimes when you go to a place like the cabin we stayed at this past weekend, you leave things behind -- magazines for someone else to enjoy, a note in a guest book, perhaps a razor or toothpaste by accident.

We decided to leave a little more behind than I'd bargained for, and I am proud to say that I felt a lightening of the load rather than a sitting in sadness.

I've had the things I didn't want to bring into the new house in my car in bags and small tubs -- books and blankets, mostly. I hadn't had the wherewithal to find a place for them yet, so I drive around with my scabbed-over wounds underneath folded reusable grocery bags. When we were packing up and checking all the rooms, I saw a bookshelf with books for small children, and had an idea.

I could leave some of the books that have been in my backseat for months here, where tiny guests could enjoy them. We don't really know the people who own the cabin, and so the ones that had nameplates from our shower with notes for Baby T___ won't be an issue -- they won't know that's a sad thing, a life event left unfinished and unfulfilled. I still felt guilty momentarily, leaving them when there are SO MANY loving notes to a baby that didn't exist, not for us.

But then I thought -- the people have grandchildren who come, and the guest book had a lot of families with babies. This was a way to give those books a home where they'll be loved in a getaway setting, loved by lots of tiny hands.

And it got my backseat to be a little less weighed down with sadness and heartbreak.

The letting go is still a work in progress, but I felt like the fact that I didn't cry my way home and I smiled as I shuffled them in amongst the other books and set up the "Little Owl" and "Little Bat" finger puppet board books I bought for us YEARS ago on the child's desk in one room means that healing is definitely happening. It felt good to leave those things behind.