Saving Stuff

After stewing about it for many months I am getting a new floor in my studio. Three years of hard wear on the painted concrete has taken a toll. It will be covered with clean laminate and vinyl. The local flooring guy came by with samples and encouragement. This is the time in the bad economy to fix your personal infrastructure. People are eager to come and do the work and you don't have to wait months.

The clay room has to be cleared so I have spent some time moving out buckets of glaze, many tools, bats- all the stuff I need. The tables and shelves are now in the barn. That was the easy part. When I put it back I will try to have everything as dust free as I can make it. The vacuum has sucked up lots of brown recluse spider eggs, mice droppings, dead roaches, bits of cloth and thread, old peanut husks carried around by the mice.

The clean room (so called) where I sew, write and paint can have its population of furniture and computer components moved back and forth as the laminate is laid. The big problem is the filing cabinets! I have been procrastinating on this for years and I just kept moving them from house to house, place to place, vowing to clean them out when I got around to it.

What if I died in an avalanche? Or a tsunami? Would I hate to think of my progeny having to go through all this stuff? The time has come and so I am here blogging and procrastinating. I have put everything from six large file drawers out on my work table. I know that two drawers are still full of the journals I kept all my work life. I used this stuff fairly recently while writing a memoir. But the book is published. So can I decently throw the journals away? I have a large black plastic bag ready to dump them into. I think I can actually do this - tomorrow. But I get distracted by a journal entry, never used in my book. Shall I keep it? What about all the files of writing ideas?

There is just too much of the written word out there! I am not Mark Twain with unfinished gems some scholar will want to discover in fifty years. Yes, that stuff has to go. Think of how light it will be to have a sparse filing cabinet with practical folders of current tax and banking information, only the most pertinent paper from board meetings, current volunteer efforts, medical records, current information about the electronic stuff I use. (Get rid of the manual from a camera I owned five years ago! And get rid of old electronics no longer of any use.)

I think that the main thing about culling papers from your life is having a large dose of humility, and the practicality to go along with it. You have to ask yourself, "Would the world still go round without this?" or "Will I ever actually make the effort to figure out what to do with some one else's papers?" (Yes, I did go through my father's papers, maybe too quickly, but steady enough to realize he had some books ready for publication, and I made them happen.) But, I am ready to be through with saving the dust-catching load of stuff.

I will enjoy a morning of reading and keeping a few papers. I will happily discard old bank statements, and I will still keep a few files of letters and memorabilia from old students and family. I think I can throw out a huge amount of photos. I will not obsess about having an identity theft if someone at the dump paws through old records of teeth cleanings and vet visits for a dog dead for twelve years.

It hasn't happened yet, but tomorrow is a new day. I keep envisioning the new clean floor and I already have the canvass and paint to get started on a new project.

For those of you who are birders, the eggs have not hatched yet! The cranes,Bob and Emily are still on the nest. I saw the eggs this afternoon. Maybe tomorrow? I will be so sorry if those eggs are duds!