Despite the fact that my mom keeps imploring me to "stay on the couch and REST," I spent the whole afternoon the first day I was home cleaning out my closet. If you're thinking that cleaning a closet shouldn't be a four-hour job, you haven't seen my closet lately.
When we moved to St. Clair from Rochester, somehow my parents let me get away with dumping my old closet/desk/dresser in boxes and toting them over to the new house. Several of those boxes promptly got shoved in a corner of my new closet (a walk-in, with even more space to accommodate my pack rat tendencies). Four years of schlepping stuff home from college and dumping it there to be dealt with "later" didn't help the situation at all.
By nature, I'm given to bouts of cleaning-frenzy, which hit me at random. Over the years, I've learned to take advantage of such moods. Otherwise, things would never get cleaned.
Well, it turned out that clearing out years of debris was also a nice stroll (or in this case, a better metaphor might be "marathon hike") down memory lane. I was amazed by all the childhood memories--and, let's face it, plenty of downright crap--I dug out of there.
First, I filtered through the boxes that I had transfered over directly from our old house and new boxes I had shoved in during college. Most of them, I haven't touched in the last five years. Inside the tightly-packed cardboard boxes, I found: childhood artwork; just about every birthday card I've ever gotten (including one for ever year of my life starting at age 5 from Liz); envelope after envelope after envelope of pictures--lots of them with doubles--from years of childhood disposable cameras; dried up markers, pens and paint sets; notebooks full of my teenage-musings (mostly about boys or ice skating); college notebooks; dozens of stuffed animals; ribbons and trophies and paper plate awards from years of ice skating, piano, swimming and horseback riding; plastic key chains; play bills; concert ticket stubs and countless other things I can't be bothered to list out. Sifting through endless piles of stuff, I felt like someone was rolling scenes of my childhood past me. Usually, my pack rat nature prevents me from sloughing off any of this kind of stuff, but somehow, this time I had the strength--and desire for a closet I could fit stuff I actually want in it--to get rid of bags and bags of stuff. Some to charity, some to the trash. All of a sudden, I had room to stand in there again.
Then, I moved on to clothes. One whole long shelf was piled high with clothes I haven't touched for the most part since I was 18. My resolve strengthened by the stuff I had managed to ditch already, I started making piles. Things I want to give away. Things I couldn't give away if I tried. Things I'm not sure how I could have possibly wanted in the first place. Things that are so worn out, they should have been thrown away years ago. Things I bought but never wore. Things I would wear if I fit into them again. Things I would never wear, no matter how good they might fit me. Things I might actually legitimately be able to keep (that pile was surprisingly small). Prom dresses I still feel too nostalgic about to get rid of. Ice skating costumes I want for posterity. And a whole big pile of shoes I would probably never wear again, no matter how many times I try to tell myself I might want them in the future.
So, long story short, at the end of the day, I had three large bags of trash, two large bags of stuff to give away, happy reminders of my childhood and one immeasurably cleaner closet. Joy.
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After an extended blog-hiatus, here I am again, now reporting live from St. Clair, Michigan. Unfortunately, I'm reporting live from my couch after having come down with mono on my way home from Berlin. According to a friend of mine from small group, mono seems to be "in fashion" in Berlin at the moment--a few of her friends have had it in the past few weeks. Still not sure where exactly I picked up the so-called "kissing disease" (I certainly haven't been kissing anyone, so that can't be it), but if it's "going around" Berlin (I swear, that city really is like a small town sometimes), that definitely raises the chances I could have caught it somewhere random. Like the U-Bahn. Gross. |