We interrupt this travelogue to muse a bit, and to ask a question

Since getting back from Ireland, we've been spending quite a bit of time helping Doug's mother clean out her house, which has sold after eight months on the market.

She has been in her apartment for more than a year now, and she's glad the house has sold, but emptying it out is sad and stressful. It's a small house, but she has lived there for fifty years and there is a lot of stuff. And her children need very little of it. 

On Saturday we rented a big dumpster, as long and deep as a Chevrolet, and started throwing things away. This was the last resort, coming only after days of hauling carloads to his mother's apartment, carloads to ARC and Goodwill, carloads to our own houses, carloads to her grandson's house.

You can well imagine how difficult it is to spend a lifetime accumulating stuff only to have a lot of it end up in a Junk-Bee-Gone dumpster. But there's no getting around the fact that some of the trappings of the house, the accumulation of more than 50 years of living, are suddenly a burden. 

You know what ends up in these dumpsters: Old flowerpots and broken appliances and cracked old suitcases that have been shoved into the back of closets for thirty years. Stacks of newspapers that were saved for no reason anyone can remember. Broken cameras that someone once thought might be repairable. A rickety stool. Stuff from the garage, from the basement, from the deep recesses of kitchen cupboards.

It feels bad to pitch it--some of it might be useful. Someone, somewhere, might want Great-Aunt Clara's mangy fur coat. (It was inside one of those cracked suitcases.) Those cameras might actually be repairable. 

But at some point you just start throwing. You get tired of making piles, of setting stuff aside for someone who might possibly want some stuff (but also might not). You get tired of not getting anywhere. You look at that big empty dumpster, you sigh, and you start throwing.

It reminded me of the summer, fifteen years ago now, when I moved away from Duluth.  I was moving to Columbus, Ohio, for the summer, and then on to the Twin Cities.  I had nowhere to live in the Cities. I had a house full of stuff in Duluth, which I was going to have to sell long-distance. I packed my car with as much as I could carry, and I hauled more than a dozen cartons of books and other precious things to a storage locker on the edge of town. 

And then I started giving stuff away. My typewriter. My skis. My violin, which I never really learned how to play anyway. Books. My dining room set. My television set, and the VCR. My stereo. My Nikkormat camera. I can't remember now what all I owned and what all I got rid of. 

I gave most of it away, and once I had served my time in Columbus (a fellowship, actually) and found a place to live in St. Paul, I vaguely wished I had some of it back, because now I had to go buy another TV. But the only thing I really regret--the only thing I kick myself over and wish I had kept--is the Nikkormat. That I still wish I had.

Now to the question: What have you lost that you wish you still had?

Dublin stories imminent. I told you I'd take you all to Ireland with me, and by golly I am.