IT'S NOT EASY selling a big piece of your life.

That's a lesson I'm learning, in confusing fits and starts, as I help my mom sell the house that's been the family home for nearly 35 years.

The logistical stuff--sorting and moving the junk that accumulates over decades--is tough enough.

But the emotional hurdles are worse, especially the ones you don't see coming.

Take something as simple as cleaning out an old dresser, recently accomplished so one of my kids could find a home for stuff currently stacked all over a bedroom floor.

What I figured would be a simple matter of sorting through the stuff in the drawers, probably throwing most of it away, didn't work out like that.

Sure, I was able to fill two trash bags with stuff that nobody was really going to use.

Seventeen old eyeglass cases, 26 empty jewelry boxes, and film cannisters that were more than 20 years out of date weren't difficult to immediately toss. Ditto for stained clothes, empty bags and a drawerful of rubber bands.

But then came the stuff with emotional weight: the "JDR" initialed cufflinks from a beloved grandfather who passed away in the '70s, favorite scarves that belonged to a beloved grandmother who died in the late '90s and personal items, such as pictures and jewelry, belonging to other relatives.

Though it won't all end up in the apartment that will be my Mom's next stop, each one of those items and dozens and dozens of others will be examined, sorted and sweated over a half-dozen more times before the move.

We're not ready for the move. There are important events, like actually selling the house, that still must happen.

The toughest part so far was deciding it was time to say goodbye to what was once home to all of us.

It's difficult to say what makes a house a home, other than that it involves emotional bonds that grow from sharing life and all its challenges within the same four walls.

We don't quite understand how powerful and real those bonds are until it's time to leave the place they all started.