Inside a Week

It is less than a week now, until I leave Connecticut and make for Wyoming, the great West. I began to clean my room over the weekend, filling three whole trash bags full of assorted items gathered from years past. Many of them were from my many years of schooling, so naturally many a full notebook or ratty old folder was thrown away. But many thrown-out items were also scattered and random objects from childhood, the size 6 soccer cleats still caked with dirt, laces frayed and tangled, from the depths of my closet; an old busted Walkman tape player radio that sat in a drawer, stuck on side B since the death of the audio tape; useless old and broken, transparent blue and green mechanical pencils with the neatest rubber click-grips from the clay pot which once held dozens of them; and more than a few issues of old ski magazines with the best skis of 1998 which sat underneath my bedside table covered in a dust so thick one might have tested the contents of the issue in it. Scores of other random items have been collecting dust for the past 10 years, and every time I would clean my room, I would come across one of these objects, garbage pail in hand, sniffing and sneezing from the dust, and finally come to the conclusion that it deserved to stay on the shelf at least a little while longer, and that it didn't have to get tossed just yet. I guess it's just time to get rid of the stuff I know I won't be needing anymore, although there are a few items that simply shall not be thrown away. The plastic skeleton model I so meticulously assembled at some point in grade school, the small wooden cannon my great-grandfather whittled all those years ago, and the small, painted musketeer figurine from Normandie are objects which I hope to never see cast aside. Meanwhile, as the battle between "old and forgotten" and "current and in-use" rages within my room, somewhere between the full trash bags and the scattered junk waiting for the hand that will pitch it forever into junk-hood, sits a green hamper piled carefully over the brim with neatly folded clothing, knit hats, and important (and portable) keepsakes: everything that will be with me in Jackson. There are only four days left at work, although it feels like longer, and each day has felt like an endurance event as I get closer and closer to the day when I will finally mount my bicycle and pedal out of that parking lot in the dwindling Saturday afternoon light for the last time as an employee. The following Sunday will be a slow day indeed as I gather my final few things, and sit down to dinner with my family for the last time in a long time before I sit on an unfamiliar seat on the Greyhound, backpack in my lap, and watch anxiously as the proud Hartford skyline retreats into the early morning air.