stuff

"I'm sorry, I can't hear you for the jackhammer in the next room..."

"Katie, do you want this?  It's been in our family now for 35 years..."

The last day and a half or so, I've been at my Mom's house.  A couple of months ago, she and Dad sold our building to a new owner, who is renovating half of it into rental units for other tenants.  We've been dragging our feet in cleaning everything out, partly because of my semester, partly because of tax season for mom, partly because Nick graduated this spring, and partly because we just didn't want to deal with any of it and didn't know where we were going to put half of it.  I come from a family of hoarders.  But the time has come:  the construction crew is here.  We are literally cleaning out while they jackhammer and put on a new roof next to us.

And I feel like I'm at a huge garage sale in the line of family memorabilia and general crap.  I've become really convicted over the sheer volume of STUFF in the last six months and I'm ready to let a lot of it go.  Because about 75% of it needs to.

There's been a lot of sorting.  It's extremely draining.  Do I really want a ginormous dry erase board for my own personal use?  Well, I might use it once.  Stress on the word might.  So the answer is no.  I have nowhere to put it and maybe useful once does not justify keeping it.

And it's like that.  Over and over again with this trunk or that box of stuff.  What about our old bikes?  The tires are flat and I have a nicer one at my house.  I never ride my old one.  There's our childhood Easter baskets.  Those stay... put them in the new storage room.  Here's another four or five boxes of old music... what do we do with it?  What about the painting that Dad commissioned for Mom when they got engaged?  Neither one of them want it.  Lordy...

You get the point.

Yesterday I spent six hours or so going through roughly ten years' worth of my own memorabilia.  I finally pared it down to about five or six boxes that are now stored in my old closet.  Thank God I had sorted through most of my stuff from childhood prior to that or I'd still be at it today.

And Mom and Dad are both here.  Sorting.  Making decisions.  Mom wants to pitch.  Dad wants to keep.  And if Dad can't keep something, he wants to give it to one of us kids.  Oy...

I think we should just take all of it to the dumpster, call it day, and play Dominion.

However, my brother did find a collage of drawings from when he was in middle school. Amongst his doodles were depictions of Jamie from Mythbusters, an Apache helicopter, a rainbow, the US Marine Corps symbol, a bunny, the One Ring, Han Solo in carbonite, a moose, and a coat of arms he designed with the initials LNS in the center (for Lord Nicholas Smith).

That is sooo going on the fridge.