“You’re Done With That?”

This morning, my daughter sat on the steps leading down to our basement watching me shovel piles of soon to be discarded ephemera amassed over the last 20 years into garbage bags, questioning why I was getting rid of so many “treasures”.

“Why, Mommy?”  She asked.  “Is it because you’ve had it for long enough?”

And just like that, she hit the nail on the head.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been slowly picking through my house; tackling small jobs like cleaning out the kids’ closets of clothes that no longer fit, cleaning out the medicine cabinet of meds that are about to expire, and weeding out the pantry for staples that have passed their prime.

But at the end of the week, I started in on my “BIG” job; cleaning out the basement.  Realistically, this shouldn’t be such a big job.  When we re-did our basement 2 years ago, I cleaned out lots of stuff we no longer needed.  But somehow, we still managed to have bin after bin filled with “important” stuff.  And so, at 6am this morning, I started to go through the bins.

And by 8am when my daughter came down to check on me and what I was doing, she found me surrounded by piles of stuff that I just no longer needed to hold on to.  Sure, I kept some things; but as for the majority of it all . . . well, I finally realized that the memories of things, events, were far sweeter than the physical mementos I had been holding on to for so long.  And with that realization, I found the courage to let it go.

So yes, my dear sweet girl, “I have had it for long enough”.