Memories: What we Save, and What we Choose NOT to

The ongoing process of sorting through everything in my life and throwing away the things that are unneeded or irrelevant continues.

This afternoon, I realized that I've been through this process a couple of times before; most recently when I moved from Texas to here in Washington state in 2006.

There's that old saying "wherever you go, there you are," and back then I was very cognizant of the fact that changing geography without dealing with the proverbial skeletons in your closet just means that you'll have the same old skeletons, except in a new closet. So I spent a lot of time going through things — both in my psyche and in my physical life — to get rid of things that I had clung to for a long time.

Now I'm slowly going through the same process again, being a little more ruthless about it in the knowledge that I'm going to have to fit what I take with me into a much smaller space.

Mrs. Denmarkguy is going through a similar process with her things and then of course we have the joint effort of going through it with our things.

I figure that if I do a little bit every day (or almost every day, I don't want to put too much pressure on myself!) I'll eventually get it all done and we won't have to move a bunch of stuff that hasn't already been sorted and decided on whether to keep or not to keep.

Today I was working on the messy shelves behind the desk in my Home Office and one of the things I actually went through were several boxes into which I had jammed old correspondence and letters and bank statements and checkbooks from accounts that I no longer even have.

I realize there's a lot of stuff I've saved because it was a pain in the butt — at the time — to either securely throw it away or shred it, and now I have a couple of big boxes sitting in the floor of my office with signs that say "to be shredded" because it is to some degree sensitive documents... such as old checkbooks.

Maybe I'm a little bit paranoid but in this day and age it seems like everybody's trying to defraud everybody else and commit identity theft so even though the information is out of date I still fear that it might be used in some way and my almost empty pockets will end up even emptier as a result of some unscrupulous twat trying to pull a fast one.

But how do we decide what to keep and what to throw away?

I've heard it said that it's not a good thing to live in the past, but when you reach a certain age you also come to the realization that you have far more "past" than you're going to have present or future. Living in the past doesn't necessarily suggest that you're not catching up with the times, but just that you're more likely to drift into memories. I know I certainly do!

One of the more difficult things I encountered today were some old letters. More specifically these were some of the last letters I exchanged with my late mother back around 2007-2008. There was also the last Christmas card I got from my stepfather in 2009; he outlived my mother by about a year and a half.

I decided to keep these small mementos because they represent a kind of connection to my origins in some way and — whether it ever comes to pass or not — maybe someday the grandkids might be interested in seeing actual handwritten correspondence from a great grandma they never got to meet.

And, if not? Well, at least there'll be a lot less garbage to sort through!

Of course, there are still miles and miles to go... and right now my "do something every day" streak is only three days old!

Thanks for stopping by, and have agreat rest of your week!

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Created at 2025.07.15 00:49 PDT
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