Initially I put our collections into four categories:
- The “Odd Thingy” category;
- The “Could be Useful and Necessary” category;
- The “My Emotional Well Being Depends on This!” aka “The Sentimental” category, and
- The “Why the Hell Did I Keep This?” category.
Categorizing is a step in the right direction, making it easier to decide what to do with all this stuff. My goal: Begin work on paring down the “Could be Useful and Necessary” stuff after tackling the hardest one of all—The “Emotional- Well Being-Sentimental” category. I’ll worry about the other two categories later. Tucked into assorted bags and boxes and drawers are my old report cards from junior high, tons of cute projects our three sons have crafted (they were such little geniuses), cards, notes, letters, a baptism certificate, pins, badges, trophies, certificates, my college essays, the kids’ drawings and literally pounds of photos. Holy smokes! The pictures we have taken over the past 30 years number into the thousands. The hours I spend picking through the photos alone add up to a couple of weeks. I must study each photo individually to decide what its fate will be. It requires careful scrutiny to sort them into piles. Sorting things into piles and categories is my life for the time being, and oh my! It is grueling. As I see it, there are seven piles of photos to make:
- Three separate piles to give to each of the three adult sons
- A pile to definitely keep for Greg and me
- A pile to possibly keep for the kids or for us
- A pile to (almost) definitely throw out
- A pile to definitely throw out—especially the ones of me that make me look fat— positively throw away—no questions asked—burn those suckers!
Some days while sitting amongst and between mounds of photos, reliving the past, I get depressed for various reasons. For one thing, how can one have ever looked so young and beautiful and be the person I see in the mirror today? But mostly, I picture myself (no pun intended) sitting in this heap for the rest of my life, unable to move—to make any decisions at all. Sometimes the memories are just too precious. Baby pictures are the hardest of all to throw away. If you have ever had a baby you know what I’m talking about. All the “firsts”…first steps, tooth, smiles, birthday parties, Halloween, Christmas, first poop on the toilet (seriously), the first day of school, first sleepover, and first fish caught, to name a few. What about all those other important moments in a child’s life carefully caught on film to be cherished F-O-R-E-V- E- R? The problem is that these children of ours, whom we hardly see, and don’t hear from often enough, were the sweetest, cutest, most fascinating and brilliant and most-loved kids ever born. How can I just throw their childhood away?
First Son’s First Steps!
Middle Son
The Youngest Son at Nine Months
Peanut Butter and Jelly! Yum!
My Middle Cutie!
“It’s way over there!”
First born!
“Why did you make me do this?”
I solve the problem somewhat by picking the 100 or so I cannot live without, and next I scan them into my computer. This is a process that requires lots of time. Ugh. Suddenly, after scanning half of them, I realize that computers are known to crash, so eventually I will either have to say good-by to them forever, or put them on disks, or better yet reprint them. In the meantime, as any recycler can tell you, photos are evil. My children’s pictures are now littering a landfill on Whidbey Island, as are all the snap shots of Greg’s and my own childhood, including my high school yearbooks. I tried burning them, but that didn’t work out very well. (Recalling the smoke pollution alone gives me shudders to this day). I carefully bundle the three separate piles for each of our three sons into packages for mailing. I place a few of their school mementos into each package too. I tell myself that I don’t want to know what they do with them. It’s their business. As far as photos go, I have what I want in my computer now, and they occasionally appear on my desktop, bringing me back to a precious, long-ago time. Sigh.