Trash or Treasure?

Or maybe a little bit of both

Hoo, boy.

Nothing happened this weekend. We didn't go anywhere; nobody came over here; we didn't even do much in the way of cooking, baking, or cleaning like we normally do on the weekends.

But still, I'm exhausted.

Because last week was a long one - one full of earlier-than-usual wakeups without a single early bedtime, punctuated by a few nights of 4am yelling from the toddler and rounded out by several hours spent going through bins stuffed chock full of nostalgia. The most recent items were some jigsaw puzzles I kept from when I had two consecutive very painful foot surgeries back in 2009. The oldest was a little snoopy cake topper that held a single candle.

Bin after bin, I sorted through every single morsel from my childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood. There were photos in there of family members I haven't seen in decades - some who I'll never see again. Some letters from a family member who tried to get in touch with me when I graduated from high school, after not showing any interest for my entire life (no thanks). Stuffed animals I remember as if they were long lost friends, and a huge cache of printed-out teaching resources I never even looked at when I was teaching.

Why do we keep this stuff? And how do we decide what to keep? I don't know if it's my old, hardened soul or what, but 95% of this stuff just went straight into the donation bag or the recycling bin. The stuffed animals I'd dreamed of passing on to my children (almost two entire bins of them!) were musty-smelling and dirty from being so well-loved. They didn't mean anything to them, and they don't mean anything to me anymore, either. There were several packages of photos from field trips, full of five-year-olds whose names I mostly remember but who are now *gulp*high school or even college graduates and don't need their weird old teacher having some random photo of them on a fishing boat. Textbooks from my college courses, in case I ever want to look up what the cingulate gyrus is or how to find a partial derivative - which might have made sense to keep at the time, but every word in the universe is on the internet now, so out the door they go.

There were some gems in there, which I kept for later reference, but after donating and recycling, I was able to consolidate 4 bins into 1/10 of one bin. Is my heart made of stone? Maybe.

But I think it was just time to let go.

What kind of person are you? Are you a dreamer who keeps things just in case? Or do you live in the practicality of today, breaking your ties to objects so you don't have to lug them around? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

Until next time.