We’ve sold our place in Montana and are up here this week packing. Since we’re leaving the house furnished you’d think there wouldn’t be too much to deal with.  But as I sort through the stuff of fifteen summers in Montana, I realize it’s a lot like editing your writing. The expression ‘kill your darlings’ (that admonishment to writers to cut all the frou frou sentences that you’re in wildly in love with) holds true with material things too. Sentimental stuff: our old cowboy hats, the bridle of my long gone horse, dozens of framed photographs, old Crate & Barrel white dishes that match our set in Santa Monica, the wooden deer head in the dining room, R’s snow boots (“We live in Southern California, why do you need them?” I ask. “I’ll wear them in the mountains when it snows,” says R.)

Heaven help me I pack it all up. Sentences are easier.