Advice from a small town girl

It was a magical Monday this week. It was 3 degrees in Irbydale when I got up. Brrr!

The car didn’t want to start, and once it did, it complained. Ten minutes of warming up barely made it better.

Going up the Irby hill, all I could think about was that the thermometer in the car said that it had made it all the way up to 8.

Then I crested the hill and entered fairyland instead of the cold gray desert.

Every sagebrush, grass and weed was wearing diamonds.

Big ones.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much flash in nature. This made most frosty days seem dull and boring. It was like half-inch mirrors had been distributed throughout the night.

It was gorgeous.

I braked, thinking, “I need to take a picture of this! I wonder if the glitter (that’s really not a big enough word) would show up?”

Then I remembered that my camera was in my desk drawer at The Record.

Then I remembered that my most recent obsession is about stuff.

I’ll try to make the connection, lest you all think I’ve totally lost the thread.

It’s January, so of course I’m trying to be the new, improved Lise Ott.

Our house, while more than big enough for two people, is not really more than big enough for two people when one of them has trouble getting rid of THINGS.

Stuff.

I have a lot of stuff. I don’t really know if my husband has a lot of stuff or not, because if he does, there’s no room in the house for it.

I’m trying to kill more than one bird with the stuff stone. First, I’m working on clearing some space in my house so I can stop worrying about suffocation.

Second, if I’m sorting through stuff, I’m not eating.

Anyway, I was looking for something particular from my past, a cigar-box-sized pink vinyl-covered box from my childhood. It contains many of my treasures, and I was looking for it in conjunction with a quilting project (how far afield can I go, anyway?) for April’s show.

The pantry holds three banker’s boxes that contain my distant past. So I grabbed the first one I came to and carried it back to my quilting room.

I found a fifth-grade report on the muskrat, complete with red marking courtesy of the teacher, who also happened to be my mother. Suffice it to say, the final comment was not positive.

I found a scrapbook (I don’t remember making a scrapbook!) that contained school report cards, photos of me and my classmates, my passport from a 1969 trip to Europe, birthday and Valentine cards from family and friends, letters from my German pen pal. There was my Cadet Girl Scout handbook and my sash with badges.

And more.

And that’s just one box.

There are two more.

And that doesn’t count a large hatbox plus a shoebox full of photos that have never made it into an album.

At any rate, as I was looking through it all (no pink box), it occured to me (not for the first time) that that stuff has no meaning for anyone but me.

It tethers me to my childhood.

And, is that a good thing or not?

Like everyone, there were good and bad moments to my childhood. Mostly good, I suspect, but for some reason, a quirk of personality perhaps, I tend to hold on to the negative aspects.

If I dispose of this box of stuff (selectively, of course), will it change who I am? If I let go of the past, can I embrace a different future? Is this emotional as well as physical clutter?

I don’t have the answer yet. So for a few more days, the box will remain in the quilting room while I consider it.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to preserve this magical Monday in my heart, rather than in any physical sense.

It’s especially tempting, in these modern times, to keep everything that can be stored in a digital format, since it doesn’t take up physical space. Tempting, but perhaps not wise.

I can’t help but think, in the very center of myself, that letting go of all this stuff, whether it takes up physical space or not, will free me in some elemental way.