What to do on a rainy Saturday? Well, my mother is de-cluttering and so am I. Our houses are across the street from each other, so we alternate whose house gets de-cluttered every weekend or so.
Today was my mom's turn, so after examining a couple of boxes of books in the garage and only taking a few books out, we adjourned to her storage room, where she informed me that "these boxes are yours." Apparently, today my address has changed to Memory Lane (which also happens to be the name of my Royal Albert china pattern).
Books: well, that's easy. Either I love them, in which case I keep them, or I can't remember them, deny they are mine, and put them in the garage sale/giveaway box. Some books have to be kept ... like the Tonka Trucks book I read over and over to my sons when they were small. Others I look at and wonder why I still have this. Some things have been packed away since I finished university and got married. I guess I didn't have room for all my odds and sods, so Mom boxed them up for the day when I would have a house of my own. 32 years and a number of residences later (3 houses of my own), these things are still in her storage room ... and they've sat there since her last move 17 years ago.
What kind of treasure did I find? Mostly paper -- which doesn't sound interesting until you realize what is on it. Some of it goes back to grade 5, when I did a project on Mealworms & Earthworms in Science. There were compositions from grade 9, my Kangaroo Rats project from grade 6, algebra and chemistry notebooks (those headed speedily to the recycling bag). There were projects I did for Pioneer Girls, which must have been from the early 1970s, for my Travel Badge ... complete with postcards from Stanley Park, Vancouver Aquarium, the Vancouver Airport, and Barkerville (yes, I lived in Terrace, BC and no, I didn't travel much) and narrative describing the places I'd been. There were pieces of paper where I had labelled all the first and last names of all of the dolls and stuffies my sister and I owned, along with their occupations! (They lived on an island community self-sufficient from the outside world).
There were letters ... and oh, my goodness, if I sat down and read them all, I would never be seen again. I ditched the ones from the kids from summer camp ... both the camps I attended and the ones where I worked as camp counselor. Wow, back in the day, we apologized for the length of time it had taken us to write a letter, said it was the other person's turn to write, and then proceeded to write about nothing at all. There were letters from boys!! I looked at a few and consigned them to the recycling as well.
After a couple of hours, my mother decided we needed to surface from the basement for some lunch. Lipton's chicken noodle soup and a slightly charred grilled cheese sandwich fueled our enthusiasm for the "olden days." Mom was finding equally entertaining relics of her youth ... and I collected a few specimens of her schoolbooks, but I have a new hiding place that is not my house.
I hit the box with my university years ... souvenirs from my Literary London trip that didn't make it to my photo album. School newspapers, programs from concerts I don't remember attending, course outlines and random notes from classes, and a booklet (9 sheets of paper, some double-sided) explaining how to register for my 4th year classes. Yes, children, this is long before the Internet was invented and on-line registration would become possible. Another brochure, explaining in very simple instructions with diagrams how to use an ATM ... "Personal Touch Banking. -- How It Works!" And there was a four page skit that my roommates and I performed at our home church Christmas talent show explaining all the trials and tribulations of our second year of university.
Even without being a hoarder, it is amazing how much I have accumulated over the years and years and years. There's still a lot of reading and purging to go, but we got a good start and had an excellent adventure travelling back and forth through time.
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