Before Timothy was born, we had used the third upstairs bedroom as a shared home office. Jamie had her desk and work computer and et cetera up there, and I had a desk and my monitor and trusty little Mac Mini, and my photo printer too. When we were pregnant with him, we transitioned Jamie's office to a corner in our basement. My own setup was deemed surplus to requirements at the time, as I could get by with just my laptop for most everything anyway. The desk, which I had built out of various Ikea components and had likely made one move too many was junked. The photo printer was sent to live with my parents, and the rest—the monitor, the Mini, and the accessories and décor I had accumulated—were scattered to various places of storage.
Jamie has finally been promoted to a window office. We ran a new ethernet line to the fireplace room so we could move her office into there, and so I bought a new desk and put it where hers had been. It felt good to retrieve the boxes out of storage and closets, to feel like I have "a place" that can be my own. After I got the essentials set up, I figured I should do some cleaning out of the bin that I had shoved everything in when I was putting my things away three years ago: a couple of folios; a handful of picture frames; some knicknacks and mementos—streetmaps from our trip to Spain and Morocco, the program from Stephen Strasburg's debut start, some hand-written notes; more cables that are unlikely to ever be used again; a hulking iomega external hard drive that weighs a couple of pounds and for which I'm pretty sure I lost the power supply to before I was married; and a cell phone from five or six years ago.
I ended up shoving the latter two items in another drawer with some electronics of similar pedigree because I didn't want to have to think about what it would take to dispose of them right now. They'll be a problem for another day, more likely another year. The decision of keep or toss always feels harder than it should be. Tossing anything seems wrong if it has potential, no matter how unlikely it is to be realized. Every once in a while I wonder if the chief end of man is not to just accumulate junk you don't know how to get rid of. You have a vague hope that, when you're gone, your legacy isn't the days and weeks it takes those left behind to sort through what is worthwhile. Perhaps our wills should include an apology for the mess. I imagined myself a museum curator of my own life—here is an artifact, and here is why it has meaning. Here is my dog Charlie Brown's collar, I wasn't strong enough to be in the room with him when they put him down. Here is a tin from Scotland where I learned about whiskey fudge, and this is why I started making it at Christmastime. Here is a stack of USB cables, it just seemed wasteful to throw them out.
After I had unpacked and sorted the bin of things, repacking some for another time, I took it back to the extra bedroom to be refilled. There were enough things losely stored in the closet that it made sense to try and organize it at least a little bit more. There were some boxes of graphing paper and empty spiral-bound notebooks alongside my yearbooks from middle and high school. There was also a stack of calendars from about 2013 to 2020, I think missing only one year. I nearly added them to the "toss" pile, but couldn't do it. They were yearly gifts from a couple of my photographer friends, and it just seemed appropriate that they would live next to the yearbooks. In a way, that's what they were. More artifacts. Our next house ought to come with a basement that's just rows and rows of drawers. We can organize them all by year.
An empty desk is a strange thing, because it seems entirely filled with potential. How we arrange the objects on it, how we decorate it becomes how we use it. The desk I got has a couple of small shelves making a small "L" to my right. Beyond hiding my router and Mac Mini and network drive, I don't know yet what to fill them with. The same goes for the walls I have in my little corner. We've never been good about getting things up on the walls, but Jamie had hung her work awards around hers, and they went upstairs with the rest of her office. I'd like to put up some prints at some point. I'll have to decide which should be given the honor. I'd like to get more from friends.
To my left is a little rolling file cabinet, and sitting on top is a tupperware bin filled with the stuff and detritus that was in Jamie's office space down here that did not make the move. The cycle begins anew.