Monday, June 7, 2010

Spring Cleaning


Now that school is out (YAY!) I have had a chance to clean out my house. I am not a messy person by any means, but sometimes when something lands in a place it isn't supposed to be, it stays there until I decide to move it to the right place. And moving something to the right place often involves cleaning out the right place so it can fit there. Kind of a chain reaction. It doesn't help that I watched a marathon of "Hoarders" on A&E the other day. If you find yourself facing a mountain of chores, errands and projects, watch some "Hoarders" and suddenly that honey-do list looks paltry and you should go sit yourself by a pool with an umbrella drink, cause you are doing ALL right.

No, I don't have a hoarding problem. I do have a great number of Dansko shoes and Clinique samples, but what I really seem to collect is sentimental stuff. Postcards from my best friend in the third grade, wedding invitations from 10 years ago, articles on do-it-yourself pedicures, pictures of boys I used to lurk on, dried corsages from school dances. All these things were in shoe boxes in my closet. I started going through them one night after a particularly energetic closet clean out and I realized that I really didn't remember my associations with some of the things. That scared me a little because 15 years ago I kept the crumpled foil chocolate wrapper for a reason. Some of the stuff I was glad to find; an 18 page letter written by my best friend while she was in Germany, birthday cards that were particularly funny, my Duran Duran pin. Good stuff. But some of those things are just so unnecessary now. I pared down my closet because I want to be able to share it with someone someday. And I pared down my memory boxes because I am ready to make new memories.

My life feels like it is in stasis sometimes. I gear up for big challenges and once I succeed (or fail... very seldom) then I sit myself down with a beer and celebrate my achievement. It feels good to be through the challenge, and I am not one to actively seek out new challenges. So, consequently, I wait for challenge to come to me. But I have realized this year that I have to go after the things I want. I want to share my house with a husband, but I have to go out there and face the challenges, not of finding him, but dealing with the emotional baggage that surfaces when I am "out there". That is the scary part. And maybe my spring cleaning has given me a little respite from some of that stuff. I have saved an awful lot of crap that has nothing to do with who I am becoming, and everything to do with who I was. So goodbye to saved artifacts of a life gone by, hello to space to make new memories.