What are you packing?

 

The edge of the area covered by the evacuation order is a quarter mile from our house.  If it does expand beyond that, we’ll have to evacuate.

 

Some evacuation orders are sudden.  You may be asked to leave immediately because you are in imminent danger.  And there are plenty of resources online on how to prepare, and what to bring if you only had 15 minutes tops.  Ready.gov is a good starting point.

 

But for us, we have some time to pack.  And what did we pack?

 

Besides the usual stuff that you find online – passports, social security cards, a change of clothes, personal items, we had time to consider other things.  Apart from practical considerations – what will fit in the car, for example – we asked ourselves two things.  And it gave us a chance to evaluate what's really important.

 

First: what things are irreplaceable?  I’m not here to argue that we should not be collecting things, but rather, experiences.  It is inevitable that those experiences have things associated with them.  We definitely packed photographs.  We are from the generation that still had printed photos and negatives.  While some have been digitized, many have not.  The hard drives with the digital photos were packed as well.  On the other hand, we have souvenirs from our travels that we did not pack.

 

The second, more difficult question is: what things are harder to replace?  Harder is a personal threshold.  It could be purely financial, or time-based, or both.  Clothes can be replaced.  You can walk into a Target or a Gap, or buy clothes online.  But what about that wedding dress?  We didn’t have a wedding dress, but I did have the Barong Tagalog (a traditional Filipino formal wear for men) that I wore at my wedding.  I ultimately decided not to pack it.  I haven’t read the book, but Marie Kondo’s question, “What sparks joy?” is appropriate here.

 

What if you had a growing collection of items that took you years to collect, but not valuable enough to insure?  You could have a sneaker collection, or a stamp collection, or some other collection that has more sentimental than monetary value.  I happen to have a collection of knives.  I packed them. 

 

Say you did have insurance.  It only pays you the monetary equivalent.  If Bill Gates lost his Porsche 959 to a fire, the insurance company could pay him a million dollars for the loss.  But I doubt anybody else who has a 959 is willing to part with his.  That means even if Bill Gates was made whole by his insurance company, he will most likely not have another 959, not that reacquiring a 959 is top priority for him.  I have an older 911 which is insured for an agreed value.  That model is certainly not as rare as a 959.  We’re leaving the 911 if we were asked to evacuate.  While it does spark joy, it’s not top priority.  If I had a third driver in the household, then I would drive the 911 out of there.

 

So, what are you packing?