There are very few possessions that I would truly miss if they were gone. Those that do have some meaning are all tied to family in one way or another. Photo albums, of course, with irreplacable pictures from when the girls were small. My mother's and my father's mother's engagement rings. A few quilts and pieces of counted cross stitch that I've made over the years. The Christmas cactus that belonged to my husband's grandfather and which I nursed back to health after the cats decided to use it as a sparring partner (it's never been the same since, refusing to bloom at Christmas, it sometimes blooms around the spring equinox, being rather a Pagan cactus). The jade plant that Caitlin used as a pin cushion, skewering the leaves with a pen when she was about 3. A spatula my grandmother used to turn hamburgers. An old, heavy one-piece ice cream scoop I bought at the last flea market I ever went to with my father. A few tiny gold pins that were my mother's. My father's bow ties. Every other thing (people and cats not included) could vanish in an instant and while I would be rather irritated (lack of clean underwear is not fun, nor is trying to find housing for two adults, two teenagers, three cats and two plants), but a clean sweep like that might not be a bad idea every decade or so. Delbert McClinton's song "Too Much Stuff" comes to mind. Maybe we should all just shift houses every few years, taking only what you could carry. You could move into a similarly equipped house, but I'll bet you'd quickly clean out the junk that someone else had left behind.

I don't think I've ever said this before, but I'm really glad I'm going to the dentist tomorrow. I will spare you the ugly details of the way my gums feel around a crown I had installed a couple of years ago, but suffice to say that chewing on ground glass comes to mind. After the dentist tomorrow I get to hop on a plane to Charlotte, where I am hoping it's warmer than the snow and hail we had this evening.