If you are at all like me, you let “things” pile up. What starts out as a small pile of pieces of paper that are important to save, for whatever reason of the moment, becomes a burgeoning, falling over pile of pulp product. Magazines, old letters, receipts, announcements, advertisements… Oh my, the pile of papers that are generated. (The only thing that gets taken care of right away are the bills. I pay them the day they come in, lest they get lost in the shuffle of other paperwork!)
Then the fine day comes along when it is TIME to clean. Usually, I end up going through magazines and I still can’t part with them. Each has a tip, or a good article, or a pattern I might try someday…if I live to be 180!
It is hard to let go of things, that I know, but when do things become an obsession? Now that, my friend is the scary part.
My mother was a saver. I have always thought it had something to do with having lived through the Great Depression. She saved aluminum pans, she washed the plastic “throw away” dishes until they were too disreputable to use again. She saved used egg cartons, presumably to give to a neighbor who had hens. She saved newspapers and magazines, and old clothes, and broken toys, and, and, and…everything else.
When it fell upon my shoulders to “clean out” her house so it could be sold to raise money to pay the nursing home, we cleaned like the devil was chasing us. Sometimes, when I go to antique stores, I do think that some of the old things we threw away were actually better than what is offered for sale, in some cases. In other cases, someone may have picked our roadside dump bags!
Trying to sort one’s own stuff is one thing. We can have reasons for keeping this or that. The task is simply awful when one has to sort through somebody else’s junk. Truth of the matter is that it may not be junk, but it sure seems like it when decision after decision has to be made of whether to keep, whether to toss, or whether to enshrine as a family memento.
My goal is to start getting rid of excess paperwork. The piles are bothering me. Oh, yes, I do have file cabinets. They are jammed full. I have to get busy.
I don’t generally make New Year’s resolutions, but if I had one wish that might come true in the next year, it would be to get a handle on the paperwork, the books, and the fabric, and to attempt to get organized. Anyone care to join me by organizing your own things?
Patricia
