November 22, 2008
Stuff
I’ve been cleaning out the old rolltop desk in my room. I’ve been using the desk in my office for nine or ten years now, so things in the rolltop have remained undisturbed, hidden away in plain site, so to speak. Most of the contents are rubbish now - very old invoices, enigmatic notes scribbled on the backs of envelopes, greeting cards from people who haven’t been in my life for a decade. I found a few things worth keeping, and a few that might not be kept, but that stirred up some memories. Most of my photos have been jumbled in two boxes on a closet shelf, waiting for me to fulfill my intent to sort and categorize them before taking up scrapbooking. I might still do that someday. Those boxes have been sealed and stacked with other bits and pieces fo my life, awaiting my move. I don’t know why there were photographs in the rolltop desk, but the ones I found are worth keeping, like the one above from my son’s second birthday party. That was the only time I’ve ever decorated a cake that came out looking the way I had envisioned.
My sis sent me the “retouched in oils, by hand” copy of my senior picture. We only had one retouched photo in the school drape made, and one in the cap and gown. Who knows how she ended up with this one, but I remember that she mailed it to me a while back.
I battle depression from time to time, but it mainly stays in the background these days. Not so in the dark days when I was recovering from surgery and trying to adapt to the profound changes that illness had brought to my life. I think I may have a private book burning for my old journal. It takes me places I don’t want to revisit.
One of my employers used my talents in helping to develop some advertising a few decades ago. We did a lot of home shows in those days, so I created materials for an activity book to give away to kids. I had forgotten, until I stumbled across this preliminary sketch, that I created a hidden object puzzle with termites hiding in the house I grew up in.
I haven’t decided yet whether to take the old rolltop with me when I move. I like it, but I haven’t used it in so long - it’s part of my clutter and takes up a lot of space. I think I’d like to have a media center or pop up tv in my room after I get resettled. If my new home has a huge master suite I could have it all, I suppose. I suppose I could probably fill a more spacious home with clutter in no time flat, too. I’ll decide about the desk before my final garage sale. Maybe it would be better to let it stay here with someone who would actually use it.
[tags]clutter, memories, moving[/tags]
Posted by skeet @ 6:26 pm • Home & Family
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November 23rd, 2008 at 3:06 am, Jennifer Says:
Burning things like that journal can be a great experience. A few years back, a couple friends and I got together on New Year’s Day, lit a fire, and brought a box full of things to let go of from the previous year(s). Some of it was symbolic, and some of it wasn’t. I burned a copy of a page from my journal that year, but I think I’m about ready to burn the whole thing now. I guess I was only partly ready to let go last time. But now, it’s full of things I don’t need to relive, that take me back to a bad place, and certainly doesn’t need to be lying around for someone else to read some day.
November 24th, 2008 at 8:23 am, Anele Says:
I shredded some notes from my past that I’d kept ahold of that whenever I read them it’d just bring back those old feelings. It was very freeing.
By the way, love the senior pic! What a knockout!