Nobody cares about my baby shoes.

Or how to have an existential crisis during a move.

As with all existential crises, this one begins with the best of motivations.

We recently moved house.

In doing so, we were forced to reckon with our stuff.

Let me take this moment to explain that we are not hoarders in the traditional sense, meaning we won’t wind up on a reality tv show or anything like that. And, during those odd instances on a dog walk when we get furtive glances of our neighbors’ garage contents before they hastily shut the door, we surmise we are better than some, and on par with others and their amounts of stuff.

Still, it was a lot of stuff.

My husband and I care about different things when it comes to what we hang on to. He would rather lose a finger than give up his prized audio vacuum tubes from the 1940s or his original copy of the Split Enz album. I would carry to my death a box of my favorite books and my pink coffee cup. Compromise, an integral part of marriage, was alive and well during this process.

You must understand. We thought we were going to live in our house for ten or fifteen years. So, we bought all our favorite shit. Griswold levels of exterior Christmas lighting. Décor for every season including Easter, Valentines’ Day and Fall, wherein I posted little felted wool ghosts alongside wax pumpkins all over the house. My husband built an English-style dart pub in the garage. We had golf clubs, extra furniture, lamps, pool toys, cases of vinyl and, due to an inexplicable addiction my husband cannot control, nearly a hundred jigsaw puzzles.

This new stuff was in addition to the old boxes of stuff we had promised ourselves we would go through “once we got to the house” but alas, that old stuff knew better. It knew it would sit there, unopened, forgotten, gathering new dust at a new address. You could almost hear it sighing with contempt.

But we were moving to a place with less storage. So, needless to say, this called for downsizing. Serious purging. Deep cuts. We were struck with the urge to purge.

Gone were the bikes we told ourselves we’d ride but never did! Adios to the decorative nachos platter! Goodbye dresser we always hated!

But it turns out, when it comes to the sentimental stuff, downsizing was not our strong suit.

Sitting on a stool in the middle of the new garage, new boxes mingling with old boxes awaiting their fate, I open an old one.

I instantly recognize the contents even though I had not opened this box since 1991. Baby shoes rested on top of a little silk baptism dress, crayon drawings of rabbits and rainbows, a little yellow crocheted hat.

They were mine, from when I was a baby. Things that were precious to my mom and carefully kept.

A pang of sadness runs through me as my eyes began to sting. She was gone so very early, at the tender age of forty-six. I can still feel her sometimes. Her warmth and her wisdom. Her strength. Can almost hear her again when I listen to John Denver and light a taper candle at dusk.

But she is gone now. Had been since 1991 when I had inherited this box of love and stowed it in my dad’s basement after she died, not ready or willing to deal with the emotional fallout of losing her, instead choosing to move across the country, wildly desperate to hang on to the idea of a better life on the west coast.

Eventually, my dad brought it out here to me so I could drag it along to the many places I had moved since then. I wonder now, if he ever opened it and leafed through my baby things, wistful with memories of me at that age and of her. I like to think so.

Dad is gone too, though.

So, what of this stuff now? Does it belong to me? Is it special to me? Does it matter?

Will anyone care about it or keep it when it’s my turn to punch the big time clock in the sky?

The answer stings with truth.

No.

No one will care. No one will care about my baby shoes, or my baptism dress or anything else I leave in those old boxes.

So, I sit here and wrestle with whether to let it all go, gently place it in the trash bin, as I pick one of the shoes up and examine it, the little white laces tinged with dirt, the shoes a little shabby, scuffed, and well-worn.

It’s the vast impermanence that strikes me, how nothing I do really matters and how at the end of it all, the only thing that will be left of me is a memory. And memories fade.

A full-blown existential crisis brought on my baby things seems the perfect time for a rash emotional response, so I bark, “I’m getting rid of this shit. This serves no purpose.” I angrily toss the shoe back in the box and wrestle with the top, but it shifts which causes my husband to look down at the box from the ladder he’s standing on.

“Are those your baby shoes?”

I nod and say. “Yes, but it’s just junk.”

“It’s not junk. You’re keeping that.”

“Why?” I ask, a little too aggressively. “None of this stuff matters.”

“We have room,” he says, “Give me the box.” I sniff and pause. Then, I hand him the box. He gently takes it, puts the cover on correctly and stows it up in the rafters.

He murmurs something about how, “you can’t get rid of stuff like that.”

I think maybe he’s right. I keep the box for the moment. But what I’m really holding on to isn’t the baby shoes, but the reminder of how much she loved me. How much I mattered. How much I left a thumbprint on her heart. I know she left one on mine.

I want to do the same for the people I love. Perhaps I am desperate to do the same. To leave my thumbprint. To say, “I was here, I loved you, and you mattered.”

And as I sit amongst the dust in the garage, I wonder if I will.