I haven’t moved for 23 years, and I’m dreading it when the time comes. The idea of going through all of our things in the house — baby clothes, old furniture, LPs, CDs, VHS tapes, even dishes and housewares I brought with me when I moved in with my husband — makes me hyperventilate. But there’s even more than that, because we live in the house that Tony’s mom and dad bought in 1976, and some (lots) of their things remain in the basement and some of the closets. It’s handy when you need a particular tool or kitchen gadget. Chances are, we have one, or maybe two, of everything. More things got shifted to the basement when my parents moved last month, going from the house in Wisconsin they moved to when they retired to a smaller house in Michigan. We inherited a table, which has become Teresa’s homework desk, the rocker that I remember from my parents’ house growing up and boxes of things my mother saved from my childhood. The dolls immediately moved in with Teresa’s, and their clothes joined the doll clothes she already had. Teresa was interested in my kindergarten report cards — I did well academically, but was apparently “quiet and reserved,” an assessment that was repeated well into my elementary school years, and Caroline paged through my second grade “news books,” the journals that I remember Mrs. Brown having us write. Over the course of my second-grade year, the writing goes from painfully neat printing to clearly legible cursive. It’s been decades since my handwriting was so nice. I read that Bjorn brought his cat to school, I suppose for show and tell; that I was going to my friend Kathy’s house after school; that my grandparents were coming to visit. Lots of things, I thought, were going to be “fun!” complete with exclamation point. Other things I wasn’t looking so forward to. On Feb. 18, I wrote that I was going to have my first confession that night. I was a little nervous, I wrote. Then, to drive home the point, I wrote that I was a little afraid. The only memory I have of my first confession is of forgetting everything I intended to say when I came face-to-face with the priest. He was very kind and led me through it. Three months later, in May, I was looking forward to my first Communion. No fear there. For now, my old report cards and news books and a few drawings are in a plastic box in the basement, sharing shelf space with discarded toys and rolls of wrapping paper from Christmases past. I’m not sure what will happen to them if and when we eventually move. Some things I’ll keep, I suspect, and some I will discard. I’ll probably keep the news books, if only to show my grandchildren what writing with pencil on paper looked like.