editing objects

LIZ SAYS: Stuff. After apartment hunting in Paris our house seems gigantic. It is very easy to live in a place for some 12 or more years and accumulate a lot of stuff. Especially when you are an artist, you find interesting things that will become something. Some do, others don't. When your husband is a writer, who writes a lot about music, you accumulate an insane amount of media. CDs,DVDs,papers,photos, manila envelopes of who know's what. That stuff is easy to get rid of.
Its the furniture we bought for our first house, which was actually just a flat in a duplex, the art we decorated with, plates bought on vacations that remind us of Italy, the bazillion photos I have to rummage through. The thing is its not really that much stuff to an American. The house is modest sized, you could make it have 2 bedrooms, if you added a wall or a closet. It has 1 and a half baths and a basement. No 50" plasma screens or restaurant style kitchens. Our bathroom has a tub and a shower, in Paris I think we saw 1 apartment that had both. Most just had a shower at the end that spanned the width of the bathroom, about 4-5 ft. There is much more built in storage there, so free standing furniture is a luxurious redundancy. I'm sure there are apartments that haven't been outfitted by IKEA (ick-ey-uh) as they call it. But then you are looking way out of our price range.
So, we have to decide what really means something, what i think now i won't regret getting rid of or keeping.
Storage is an option we are exploring for things that are precious to us. It's kind of cheating, because we can still have things without the responsibility of hauling it over two continents and an ocean. We can feel like gypsies without only having what we can carry. But, the thought is still the same. What really matters? It is strange how much one invests in things emotionally. You wouldn't think looking at a dresser would make you think so deeply about how these things sort of define you. But, I remember thinking when we bought the maple dresser with the vaguely deco details, that I could live with this for the rest of my life. Now, here I am wondering if I should put it on eBay or Craigslist.