Spring Cleaning

Spring is in the air and I'm in the mood to throw shit away. I had a plan for today, and actually did what I planned. There is a closet in the middle bedroom that was so piled full of shit there wasn't room for any more. My husband and I moved here 7 or 8 years ago, and most of the stuff in that closet hasn't seen the light of day since we moved in. We pulled all of it out, except a stack of jigsaw puzzles, and piled in on the livingroom floor. Most of it was clothes, but there was also a big box full of just absolute junk. Old paperwork from two jobs ago, manuals for phones and things we don't even own anymore. Stuff that should have been thrown away years ago, but instead I stuffed it in the closet.

Out of a closet full of junk, I think we only saved about 2 or 3 grocery bags of stuff. A couple of pairs of shoes, a jug of pennies, a bag of kitchen towels, some yarn and embroidery floss. Real treasures. Now we have 2 trash cans full ready to haul to the curb Sunday night and a van full of clothes and other stuff to drop off at the Goodwill. My husband even decided to get rid of a big bag full of baseball caps. He even decided they were in such bad shape they weren't worth taking to the Goodwill. But they were so important we saved them in the closet all this time.

It feels good to get rid of all that junk. I knew it was almost all clothes that didn't fit anyway, so it was easy to get rid of most of it. There is another closet, in the office, that is full of all kinds of junk. It's going to be harder to go through all that stuff because we're going to have to actually look at most of it and figure out what it is. Does this manual go to anything we still own? Does this answering machine work or not? Do we really need to save the empty box the computer speakers came in? My husband is one of those people who thinks you should save the boxes things come in. That way if you ever move, and still have whatever came in the box, you can pack it in the original box. Somebody from a mail list I'm on had the same problem with her husband, so she just folded up one box a week and took it out with the trash. By the time her husband even noticed, she had almost gotten rid of all of them. My husband isn't all that bad, and I also have a problem throwing away shoe boxes, so I can't really complain.