Tag: hoarders

What To Do With The Past

~ humoringthegoddess ~ 20 Comments

Okay. Okay okay okay.

I haven’t written anything on my latest novel. I have barely made any Angel Tears. I haven’t read much of my book about the Titanic nor started my sparkly bead tapestry.

I’ve actually been busy redirecting, rearranging, repainting and re-carpeting my bathroom, closet, and bedroom.

That’s not a big deal.

Well, it is.

Everything I own from two of those rooms are in three big plastic containers or in a big huge snow-like pile in another room.

Twenty-some years of clothes, jewelry, unicorns, jewelry boxes, hats, colognes, TV remotes, cards, beads, used football tickets, and more.

Now that I have brand new carpeting, a new shower and cabinets in the bathroom, closet shelves, black-out blinds, and two less pieces of furniture, I’m lost.

I am fortunate. Of this I have no doubt. This is my hubby and my last hurrah before he retires in a year. What will be here will be it. My retirement in paradise will be parenthesized by what we are able to do these months.

But these are new colors for me. New style. Sanded and re-stained furniture. Even plants in the bathroom.

What am I supposed to do with all these leftovers?

I already reorganized my bathroom drawers. Got rid of tons of stuff, bought little clear bins to organize, even learned how to fold bath towels a new way so they’d fit in the new cabinet.

But the things in these bins.

Like the things still lurking in my breakfront in the livingroom and on the shelves in my work room downstairs.

Memories, souvenirs. Slips and scraps of the past I’ve kept all these years. Chicago Bears tickets, games I went to with my sons. Jewelry I wore when I worked. Cards from my grandkids. Hair clips and party beads and little green tiaras and a sun hat with bling I made 15 years ago because it was “the” thing.

Unicorn statues out the gazoo. A unicorn rug my late mother in law made for me to hang on the wall. A cool street painting from Las Vegas we picked up 25 years ago. A bell ringing tapestry from the Renaissance Faire when I used to go.

So many things that bring back so many memories.

Yet I’m doing my best to downsize.

I have done a lot of that throughout my house this past year as I’ve remodeled and repainted rooms. I have cleaned out three hoarder houses in my life and do not want my kids to have to go through that with my junk.

How do I decide what to keep?

How do I decide what to give away?

How do I decide what to give to Good Will?

A bunch of said items came from Good Will once upon a time. That world is a treasure trove of helpful items, wall paintings, water pitchers and plates for under plants and wrought iron planters.

But I digress.

This will be the hardest thing I’ve had to do in a while. And memories are a sensitive subject in my life at the moment, too, if you remember. Make them, keep them, I always say.

I have told myself that I should give a few things to the girl grandbaby, but not too many. She doesn’t need an old granny’s junk in her bedroom at four years old. I should ask a few people I know if they would like this or that, knowing that they would.

The remainder?

Send them with love and kiss back into the world so they can bring joy to others. I mean, who couldn’t use New Orleans party beads or pretty bling bracelets and earrings?

Okay — that takes care of three things —

 

 

 

 

Thanks is a Clean Word

~ humoringthegoddess ~ 5 Comments

ThanksI am writing my Thanksgiving Day Thanks Post a bit early this year. Between family gatherings and Black Friday shopping and all-weekend football games, I never know when a moment of mental clarity will hit, nor when I might be able to share said clarity with you. I have a lot to be thankful for this year. You do, too. I don’t need to state the obvious — my past blogs reveal the miracles of survival I’ve been privy to the last year (couple of years, really). And I’m thankful for the usual — health, family, sanity (although there are those who wonder about that last one). But there is one thing in particular that I’m extra thankful for. Especially this time around.

I’m thankful that with company coming Thanksgiving Day, I have to power clean my house.

Now, before you chuckle and say people come for the food and friendship and not the eye candy, you are right. But I’ve always said you need to throw one big party a year so that you can really clean house. How many of you pull out the sofa and pick up dust bunnies and lost pencils and ancient Cherrios? How many  of you move the super-fragile things you have precariously perched on shelves and speakers to dust?  When was the last time you vacuumed the crumbs out of your sliverware drawer? Or organized your mail pile?

This is not Hoarders over here. I do have an over-accumulation of furniture and boxes downstairs, some remnants of departed family members, others in a holding pattern until my son sells his house. We won’t talk about the Mud Room: that is my husband’s jungle, and I get lost just looking in there. Somewhere down there is a nice, cozy TV area, kinda a sports-theme corner with a small TV, sofas, chairs — you know. But I wouldn’t know what it’s like sitting down there because it’s temporarily storing a gym’s worth of exercise machines just waiting for bodies to arrive.

My plans for this pre-Thanksgiving weekend are not so ambitious as to break up the chi that has so carefully been arranged down there. The bedrooms are fresh and clean, and a path will be made in case family members are too full and sleepy to make their way home Thanksgiving night.  No, my thanks on this pre-T day are a lot more humble.

I am going to give thanks by cleaning out my Tupperware cabinet. I then hope to move along to my bedroom closet. Not too much at one time — progress is often made one step (or cabinet) at a time. But my heartfelt thanks for getting one more thing off of my to-do list will be with me long after the turkey is turned into soup.

Remember — giving thanks on Thanksgiving — on ANY day — is not only about thanking the powers-that-be for your family or your health or your connection with Spirit. The powers-that-be hear your thanks for that every day. And the Universe thanks you in return.

What they don’t hear is your thanks for finding the shoe you’ve been looking for for two months. Or the flash drive that fell down into the sofa a long time ago.

Thank you.

Weird World

~ humoringthegoddess ~ 3 Comments

xI swear, the older I get, the weirder the world gets.

We human beings are an interesting lot. Not only do we wait five minutes for a close parking space when there’s six of them five spaces back, but hold deep conversations with our pets (including our fish), go on one-food diets (the banana diet, the steak diet, the carrot diet), wear spandex (which never looks good on anyone), and dial numbers our cell phone while driving and drinking a soda. It seems that we also have an insatiable appetite for the absurd, for the extraordinary. For the idiotic.

And it doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

We all have slowed down to look at an accident; that’s a strange but common habit. I think it’s one of those “There, for the grace of God, go I” kind of thing. So it is with chuckling at people who fall down or get stuck in their car door,  playing fantasy football (how can you bet on someone who might not even be playing?), or playing the lottery. We do things and watch things and say things and hope things will make sense in the end. But then there’s the things that cross the line of normalcy.  Things that touch that nugget of sanity that we hold so close and dear and tight. An invasion of the senses…an invasion of the common sense kind.

There are television shows about people who can barely walk through their houses because of the “stuff” they’ve collected, restaurants who have dead bugs and two inches of grime mixed with dirt on their food vents, and young, hip people who do nothing but swear and have sex and  hang out somewhere in Jersey. There are talk shows where the guests scream and swear and throw things at each other, and others where they share their most private disfunctions. There are movies about dismemberment, torture, and being buried alive. Cities crumble like dominoes and civilizations are wiped out.

And America watches. And wants more.

I have to admit that I’ve fallen into some of these holes.  Half the time I can only take the first 30 minutes of Restaurant Impossible or Kitchen Nightmares. (Those kinds of shows make me not want to eat out ever again.)   I have peeked into the show “Hoarders,” although I can only stand 5 minutes at a time.  The bloody dismemberment/torture things I steer clear of, although I have been known to peek out from behind the pillow to watch a few zombies get their heads chopped off.

So I ask you: Why are humans drawn towards the flame of extremism?

This nonsense runs the gamut from funny to freakish.  Why do we ride the fastest and highest rollercoaster in the land?  Why do we make three dates for the same time, knowing we can’t keep any of them? Why do we waste time watching TV shows about murderers and drug addicts and out-of-control bikers? Why can’t we turn away from movies about cheating wives or possessed nuns or hillbilly duck call makers? Hollywood has made death and destruction and sex second nature to us. The more blood, the better. The more bizarre the situation, the better. The more stupidity, the more we watch.

Why do we push ourselves to the horrific edges that we do?

Maybe it’s an attempt to reconnect with our primal self. An attempt to prove to ourselves that we’re better than we think.  Better than everyone else thinks. That we can experience absurdity at its worst and  survive. After all, survival is primal. It is a part of our DNA.  And there are a lot of techniques we have developed through the centuries to maintain that level of survival.

I’m not tearing down others’ forms of entertainment. Everyone is different. Everyone comes from a different part of the cosmic thread to form that all-familiar tapestry of life. But I do sometimes wonder how far humans will go for the sake of entertainment. How scared we will allow ourselves to become. How smug we will get from others’ misfortunes. After all, it is them and not us, right?

How this all ties together for a blog I’m not sure. All I know is that I don’t want to be one of those people who  throw their panties at a talk show host. I don’t want to be sliced or diced or have to eat bugs to survive on some deserted island. I don’t want to taxidermy my pets after their demise or tattoo every inch of my body.

But what I don’t want even more is to desensitize my life. To compare cinema buildings toppling to the fall of the Twin Towers. I prefer to take the lame train through life. I don’t need to prove my endurance level is higher than the rest of the world. I don’t need my adrenalin pumping any faster nor have my blood pressure shoot up.

That’s what my day job is for.