Herban Sprawl

22 October 2009

It’s fall housecleaning time around here. Owing to a general inability to deal with the mountains of accumulata, this process is lengthy and unnecessarily painful. However, it’s a good time to get it out of here.

My particular downfall is clipping recipes. I have a new stack of them to deal with, but at least the magazines themselves went off to be recycled today. And, thanks to a very lovely week, weatherwise, the front yard is getting cleaned up on an intermittent basis. I had intended to indulge in more of that today, but instead found myself squirreled away in the kneewall storage. The last time I did an overhaul of that area was probably five years ago. Stephanie helped me, which was good. She kicked butt and took no prisoners. Today I hauled out some boxes of goodies that need to be gone through, made room for other items that had been jammed in there, and cleaned out the coffins of out-of-season clothes.

It was dusty work, difficult - thanks to the cramped space (you have to crawl in on all fours), and generally took a lot longer than I might have liked. However, the space is much more tidy and I used my spiffy labeling machine to make easy to read labels of the collection of Rubbermaids in there. I worship at the foot of the Rubbermaid Goddess!

Cheri called while I was attempting to put the puzzle pieces back together, and patiently waited while I put down the phone, juggled a Rubbermaid here and there, then congratulated me on each victory. Of course, thanks to her tiny size, she will be the likely recipient of some nice items I can’t squeeze into! It’s a bonus to know I can share a couple of beautiful silk tops, my Over Y’alls and so on.

I guess the point of all this sorting and tossing is not so much to make room for all the rest of the stuff as it is to shed old skin, so to speak. It’s good to dump things from another time in our lives, and particularly good when it relieves us of some pain or will go to a good home.

I discovered a collection of old newspaper clippings from the Illinois-Michigan Canal project my dad was involved in, and the first thing that came to mind was to send those to the visitors’ center for their archives. I certainly don’t need to keep that stuff, and they could use it. By the same token, a few years ago, I had a lovely bonfire of letters from an ex-beau. Now that was satisfying! Sometimes it takes a while before we can let loose of things, and I’m beginning to think it is to allow us time to get to that place where when we do dump the stuff, we appreciate that we can indeed let go.

The House Goddess comes tomorrow, and while I still have some things I need to deal with before bedtime tonight, at least I know I have a clean closet, the summer stuff is put away neatly and labeled so I can quickly put my hands on what I need when the first warm days appear. I do have six boxes and two desktop hanging file boxes that need to get cleaned out, but then I can also fire up the firepit on the patio and torch something like ten years of canceled checks! (Yes, Lawyer, I did sift through and pull the mortgage checks… I still have the sticky note you stuck on the house settlement papers that reminded me to save every single one of those.)

Yeah, it’s good to clean it out, get it all dusted and spruced up before the holidays. Real good…