Cleaning

J and I are in a unique situation this year. We temporarily don't live in the condo that has been our home for 12 years. We'll go back once the obligations that are keeping us away are taken care of.

(It's a long and complicated story involving parents and their growing need for care. Or perhaps it's a short and simple story that happens to be too sad to fully recount. Once J's mom is settled somewhere permanent with the proper level of assistance, we'll move back into our home and sell hers.)

As much as possible, we're trying to treat this extended vacation as a unique opportunity to evaluate the way we live from a more objective vantage point and make potentially huge changes without the hassle of living in the middle of these transitions as they happen.

I've read Marie Kondo, and while I'm not completely sold on her method (I'm sorry, but the clutter of too many books actually does leave me joy, so where does that leave us now?), it has inspired me and J both to begin scything through the unmanageable piles of crap that have accumulated in the name of our collections and obsessions. I thought mine were clothes and books, mainly, with a secondary helping of craft things. I've radically pared down the mess (while leaving plenty of books to cozily crowd every shelf in the house), and I decided to spend today addressing the craft supplies.

What I realized, as I ruthlessly tossed generous lengths of perfectly good fabric, jars of glitter (but you love glitter!), strands of beads purchased on sale because BEADS! FOR CHEAP! and other things that I might have some day made something with (but didn't), was that my real problem is ephemera. Memorabilia. I've kept every diary, every birthday card I've received, and every notebook paper drawing anyone has ever made for me since I was in high school if not earlier. Photographs. God, photographs. Sketchbooks. Schoolwork. Letters. I used to have pen pals in high school. So many giant storage bins filled with paper.

What am I going to do with all of it?