At some point in the future, three different moving vans will show up at my house delivering 16,000 pounds of household goods that are currently in storage in Virginia, Massachusetts and Kansas.
I dread that day. My 14-year-old put it pretty aptly when he said, “It’ll be like Christmas, but with a ton of crap.”
He’s not kidding. We have basically two entire households of stuff in storage. Some went in when we moved to Germany, and stayed there while we were in Canada. Some went in when we moved from Canada back to Germany. And some went in just last month when we left Germany again, this time for retirement.
The military will hold it all for one year while we are in transition (in our case, traveling around the U.S. for a year in an RV). At that point, unless we have a very good justification for an extension, it will be dumped on us.
I love my stuff. I can’t wait to see my wedding album that accidentally went into storage, and my fall decorations that I would love to be putting out right now. I won’t have my Christmas decorations this year, either.
On the other hand, do I really need three couches and two dining room tables? We originally intended it all to be in storage for two years, and now it will be as long as seven for some of it. I doubt my much-loved washer and dryer will work anymore, and that ugly old orange couch will be even uglier and older.
If we had the opportunity, I would have drastically downsized before retirement. Going through the retirement process right now, I think downsizing should be at the top of the to-do list.
Retirement is a time to start new, fresh and unencumbered. Instead, at a time when we might be moving into a smaller house, we will be inundated with all the stuff we should have gotten rid of years ago. Who knows if we’ll even have room to sort through it all.
I suppose we could look on the bright side and consider that we might be able to sell some of it, and that we likely won’t have to buy anything new for our future home.
But who am I kidding? All that stuff will probably find a place with us, and continue to follow us around.
After all, you can take the spouse out of the military but you can’t take the military out of the spouse.
