That being said, I've been working extra this week on de-cluttering my life. I had some extra time and thought it best to scour my belongings for things I no longer needed. My walls are still covered in photos and I still have a regrettable assortment of knickknacks (but only if they have some sort of sentimental value to me--I don't just keep stuff around for the fun of it. Usually), but my closet and drawers are looking much better.
But what I have found so amusing this week is that I have tended, throughout the years, to label things surprisingly well. While looking through a box wherein I had papers I thought were important (all dating at least nine years back, containing notes I'd written to my older brother, a memento I got from a family reunion we had, etc.) I found an envelope carefully labeled as candle wax from the memorial service we went to on the one year anniversary of September 11th. Ironic, considering that that was just this week, but I don't think that the envelope had seen the light of day for the past nine years.
I'm sure I'll end up throwing it out (candle wax? seriously?) but at the same time, if little twelve-year-old me went through all the trouble of saving the wax, labeling the envelope, and putting it into my memory box, shouldn't Present Day Me be allowed to feel sentimentality both towards the memory of September 11 as well as Shorter Me?
I think I have issues. I should feel free to throw things away. Ugh. I wish Shorter Me hadn't labeled it so well. Then I wouldn't have known what is was, wrinkled up my nose at unidentified candle wax, and thrown it away without regret.
Sigh.
4 comments:
I am in the midst of doing the same. I have 4 boxes left to go through. Now that The Mr. and I have a Little One, I need the storage room for baby things! It feels good to release things from the trash, and from our belongings, but sometimes it's good to keep things a little longer too! Maybe next time you go through those sentimental items you'll be ready to get rid of the candle wax, but right now it's still important to keep. That's just how those things work. I have an envelope of cards given to me when I broke my arm in 5th grade and every time I go through it it gets lighter. But I still keep about 1/2 of them every time I go through the envelope!
I meant "to the trash" not from.
I think Present you should feel free to keep Shorter You's envelope of wax. Though when said like that, if makes you sound a little crazy, but I completely understand and would probably keep the wax too. Who knows, maybe it'll be one of those things you can show your maybe-kids one day and talk about random memories of that first memorial and then how you found it 9 years later.
I'll keep it at least for a while. All this discussion thereof has added yet another layer of the story of the wax, so to speak! We'll see what I think next time I run across it, though...
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