Day 30

Church is on the agenda and that’s all I have planned. Wet again. I may find another place to sort or I may just curl up and watch any old thing on TV. Next week the Giants games will be back! I enjoy baseball. Carol is so tiny and frail. Every time I get to see her, I wonder if it’s the last time. One of the heartrending events of the Eighth decade is the rising amount of sad news about friends.

Last Sunday I sat with Nancy at the museum volunteer lunch provided by the board of directors. When Karen came around with the token gift, a shot glass with Battery Point Lighthouse on it, the subject of collections came up. Nancy admitted to owning 300 plus Barbie dolls, Beanie Babies, and Bears. She said her son would have to decide how to deal with them. I thought about my history with things. We moved so often in my childhood that nothing was ever saved from one place to the next. Often we started in a new city in a hotel, then an apartment, and finally a house just before we moved again. Once we moved five times in one city. My father would not allow taking any possessions we had acquired while there. I never learned to value things. To me, my possessions are useful or gone.

On my 82^nd birthday, my new year’s resolutions included sorting and purging. The urgency seems to be connected to the idea of legacy. What will I leave behind when I exit the earth? I don’t want to leave a mess so it’s up to me to simplify now. After cleaning up after my mother and my son, I know the discomfort of looking through the remains of someone’s life. So, looking around the house I started deeply thoughtful redistributing of the items I have that could be useful to someone else. For all my constant assessments, I do have things that need to be moved on. For example, I have clothing that I haven’t worn in years that I enjoyed having and they now need new closets to adorn. The china and crystal that my mom thought were household staples when I married in 1954 and nobody uses any longer take up cupboard space. Hard to get rid of items that are old and out of date.

The largest collection of personal items I own are old journals and a drawer full of words that nobody will ever read. I am clinging to them, enjoying the old me that appears in print, and hope I will know when to deposit them for disposal so someone else doesn’t have to do it..