Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Busy, Busy

It will be quiet here at RV Vagabonds for a couple more days; my mother contracted to handle another estate sale last week. Her business partner is tied up with family "stuff" so Denny and I and my aunt and uncle are filling in for this one.

I have to say, going through another person's accumulations really makes you think about all the belongings and memorabilia that we hang onto. In this particular
household, the man of the house catalogued everything he owned or did.
He created fat notebooks full of favorite cartoons, vacation brochures,household appliance manuals, Glenn Miller articles, fishing articles,to the tune of 12 large garbage bags full. That's right, garbage bags, because the family doesn't want the stuff and neither will anyone else. A lifetime of carefully catalogued, filed, annotated notebooks and file cabinets stuffed full is going in the trash because it means nothing to anyone other than the person who created it.

How many people have collected items; elephants, art glass, fishing gear, you-name-it
that their kids will later look at and go "psshh, what would I do with that?" Very few people have the same passions as their parents when it comes to collecting it seems.

I have to say, at this stage of our lives, our two sons won't have to deal with too much of that; there's not a whole lot of "stuff" that can go into 400 square feet of space and the small pile of boxes in storage in my mother's basement would take about a half hour to go through since our personal memorabilia has been winnowed down to two 14 inch by 14 inch boxes. And this summer I'll probably go through the pile again
and put some of the remaining things in the other boxes onebay.

Because I don't want some stranger to go through my things and think, "how sad".

2 comments:

A couple of newer paintings 2019 said...

How well I know this! After my father died we found that he had a collection of used coffee creamers! WHAT!!!!!

Anonymous said...

I like to think that I would register fairly low on the clutterometer .. but after 18 years of living in the same house it is amazing how many boxes of stuff we have accumulated. I should probably be thinking about downsizing. Just going through one box a week would make a difference. Maybe tomorrow. :-)

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