While waiting for my realtor to show up to take photos of the winter wonderland where my house is nestled, I attacked the office: the desk, the files, the chest of drawers parading as a guest nicety but filled with papers and finally, the closet. The closet is big, and we've crammed it full of papers, computer equipment, upright files and a few legitimate items such as bed linens for our guests. I spent three hours at this task, turning a neat room into a war zone. The closet is bare but the rest of the room is piled with shreddables, memorabilia, computer equipment--a dangling life.
I love to purge. We're buying a shredder this weekend and I'm gleefully going to mulch the past. There's a lot to save, too, including my kids' artwork, writings, old health records, report cards, many books, love letters to my husband, portfolio pieces I've written over the years, including a thick folder erupting with poems I wrote back in my darker days. I can't wait to sift through those ashes.
The computer pile is waiting for Marty to inspect. There's a huge box of junk that we moved here from Costa Rica, a tangle of wires and disks and whatnot. Next to the box is a scanner, three hard drives, more wires and enough software to sell on ebay except it's obsolete. I'm hoping he can part with most of this junk. Am I crazy to give him a choice? This is a man who cuts wires and plugs off electronics in case he'll need them for a future project.
Between the cords and the memories, the literal and the figurative have come together in a way I appreciate. The computer mess keeps my blood pressure up and the mementos take me back to a time where there was no leukemia, a time where there was just the wonder of my family, the fuzzy future, and my husband's hording of the once-upon-a-time useful, and now-that-the-future is here, tossable.
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2 comments:
Somehow I know Chris and Marty would get along like a house on fire. Chris had a closet full of obsolete computer equipment. I made him purge it when we moved into our current home. We're now down to an old hard drive and a monitor. Now if I could get him to part with the 5000 binders from engineering classes that he never looks at, but can't possibly let go because you never know when you might need to look something up when the internet is down.
Very nice post, and so true. I don't like daily cleanup, but I love purging. It's hard to do because you wonder if you'll want something the minute you've gotten rid of it.
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