Paper Hoarding

I have a number of blogs that I read on a regular basis.  One of them had a link to another blog that sounded interesting.  The woman on this second blog had the current post and then links to older posts.  I clicked on her post about hoarding and how she wasn't a hoarder, she just had lots of interests, and hates to put things away for fear she won't be able to find them again.  She mentioned she tears pages on recipes and home organization, etc., out of magazines so that she isn't keeping the entire magazine for one article.  She's even started a binder.  It reminded me of some things that we've discovered while sorting through my mother's estate.

One of the things we discovered were boxes and boxes of clippings.  My mother kept clippings on everything that interested her.  Recipes and newspaper and magazine articles (especially on multiple births, adoption stories, celebrities, gardening, baking, cooking, health and exercise, you name it).  Some of these boxes of clippings dated back to 1976.  I quickly discovered I couldn't just dump these boxes of paper in the recycling.  I had to sort through them because in the middle of all the clippings I found family pictures, credit cards, and important papers that had gotten mixed in through the years.  It is amazing how many of these boxes she had. I don't think she ever went back through them after she filled them.

In addition to the boxes, she had scrapbooks of a sort, especially on antique dolls.  She'd pull pages out of a book or magazine leaving just the pages that contained pictures of things she liked, and then add pictures cut from other sources until the pages were a hodge-podge of pictures.  There were so many of these that I've marveled at the amount of time it must have taken her to compile all of them.  Now I know what she was doing when I wondered how she spent her days, when I knew she wasn't cleaning her house.  She was clipping and glueing all those scrapbooks.

One of the funniest things we came across though were the recipe notebooks.  In sorting through the living room, my daughter came across a binder labeled "My Favorite Recipes from the 40's and 50's."  My daughter said, "Oh, Mom, we have to keep this!"  We set it aside to take home.  Later that afternoon we found Volume 2 and again, carefully set it aside.  Not too long after, we found Volume 9 and then Volume 7 and at that point we decided there were just a few too many notebooks floating around to keep and the notebooks, instead of being sacred, became funny.  We eventually found Volumes 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8.....and all were emptied and the clippings recycled.  We kept the first couple volumes.  We are hoping they really are her favorite recipes of the 40's and 50's.  :)

~Jane