We'll be downsizing soon (moving to a smaller house on a smaller lot), and I've spent much of this weekend removing from our attic the rest of the boxes (mostly) that I didn't bring down last weekend. Much of the stuff I found up there had been...well, "stuffed" is the appropriate term...stuffed up there soon after we moved in in 1983. And not thought of since. Until today. And today we're mostly doing what we might have done twenty-five years ago: throwing it away.
I'm naturally wondering what we thought we were keeping it for. Probably not for any practical reasons, but just in order to buy some time to distance ourselves from the past it represented so that we'd become ready, someday, to let it go. And today, indeed, we're not feeling much attachment to any of the stuff at all. We're long since ready to let it go and be done with it. Dusty boxes, moldy paper...faded or forgotten memories.
My wife did set aside her tassel from the mortarboard she wore for high school graduation (45 years ago), however. And I set aside my "Youie Journal" from 1989, intending before I recycle the paper to try to read and understand what I was experiencing that manic summer when I imagined that The She-God fancied me.
So I would have said the rule is, if there is an old unopened box in the house just pitch it without opening, but finding old journals and stuff is pretty cool.
ReplyDeleteI think living with my dad helped me be an anti-pack rat.
Plus, I like to separate the "mixed paper" from the glossy paper and from the newspaper and from the cardboard and from the glass and from the metal and from the trash before taking the stuff to the recycle center and the garbage dump....
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