Heirlooms & Detritus

As I’m cur­rent­ly engaged in my bien­ni­al deep-clean of my house, I’m con­cen­trat­ing on get­ting rid of things that I don’t active­ly use. It’s an assort­ment of the usu­al stuff, clothes I bought, books I no longer want, etc. Dis­pos­ing of that stuff is pret­ty easy, but this year I’m con­cen­trat­ing on the stuff I’ve been haul­ing around in box­es for years; stuff that just sits, tak­ing up space. Most­ly mate­r­i­al mem­o­ries.

I haven’t worn my Notre Dame mono­gram jack­et in a decade. Do I real­ly need to keep it? I have my baby chi­na. I have no mem­o­ry of ever eat­ing off of it. Do I real­ly need to keep it? Do I real­ly need to save my year­books, my col­lec­tion of bat­tle­ship draw­ings, my base­ball cards, my com­plete set of unopened Star Wars Episode I Lego? What’s mine & spe­cial to me I will keep, and it’s most­ly small, or dig­i­tized. Pho­tos, my nation­al cham­pi­onship ring, my first sto­ries. There are also items that have been hand­ed down to me that I care for: my grand­pa’s cuf­flinks, my grand­ma’s poet­ry, some of my mom’s antiques, quilt­ing & needle­work.

I’m hav­ing trou­ble dis­cern­ing the line between what I want to save, what I don’t care about, and what my son might want years from now. And, I real­ly, real­ly, real­ly don’t want to haul around giant plas­tic tubs for the next 30 years that are a per­son­al library of my life as a child.

File this under: Crap that I don’t want but don’t know how to get rid of.