Memories Like the Corners of My Mind...

What's the saying? A picture is worth a thousand words? What about memories? Well...What About Memories!!!! Today I delved into a sore spot in my room and found box after box of pictures of the kids when they were young. "Remember this camping trip?" I would quip to Dave. "No, I have no memory of it" How is that possible? I remembered every little odd-ball memory of the trip with the help of the pictures. Where we were, what we did, how we felt, the head lice episode etc...and he has no memory of it? Now I see why it takes so long to get rid of stuff. You have to relive the memories so you can remember them and then let the item go.

For instance I found a Social Security Certificate from 1950 for my grandfather that said his first months payment was going to be $101.65, but the rest of the payments for the year would only be $33.50 a month. Now why do I need to keep that? My mother did, do I? Is there some significance in it, a bit of history perhaps? I found my grandfathers Death Certificate as well and discovered what my great-grandmother's maiden name was, now that is something I can use in my research.

Is everything relevant or irrelevant? I want to know. Why do we keep what we keep. 8+ boxes of our family pictures of the girls activities,sports, family stuff and camping and we're not talking shoe boxes, I mean big boxes of pictures. Dave has been trying to get them all onto DVD's but there are just so many of them. That's not counting all the boxes we have of my mother's pictures from the 1940's or family pictures of us kids growing up. Then there are my grandmother's family pictures. At least Dave's sister has the family pictures in Canada otherwise we would not have room in the house for it all. We are trying to downsize if that is possible.

Then I have all the pictures of the day care kids that I took care of years ago. All the fun things we did as a group. The places we went. I'm still in touch with some of the parents and think I will give them their child's pictures to them. I sure don't need them any longer.

Now take clothes. You look at every article of clothing and think will I ever be able to get back into this, maybe if I loose enough weight. Or...remember when you wore this to that party and the great time you had and so on and so on. Took three bags of clothes to the Salvation Army Family Store over the weekend. Gosh it felt good to get rid of them. Need to get rid of more.
Time to put all of it away until next weekend. 935 days and counting.

See ya out there...