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

On My Soapbox

My wonderful, 80-year-old, mother passed away this spring.  I loved her so much and we had so much fun together over the years.  But she left a house stuffed with possessions that I am now having to deal with.  I don't even know what to do with most of it.  Boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff.  Stuff she had collected with hobbies and interests in mind, and stuff she had purchased with an eye to reselling.  She had a large inventory of things that had been in her antiques business. We had a huge garage sale a couple weeks ago and hardly made a dent even though we sold things very cheaply just because we knew it had to go.  It is so depressing and very overwhelming.  Once in a while anger flares at the situation I've been put into.  While I would like to just take time to grieve for her and remember all the happy times, instead I find myself trying to deal with all the stuff.  The whole situation has really made me re-evaluate the amount of possessions in my own home.  Yes, I am bringing home some things from my mom's house, but I am also getting rid of some of our clutter.  As I have more time - after dealing with her house - I'm going to seriously organize and clean out my own home.  I have promised my daughter I will not leave the same kind of mess for her to deal with. 

As much as I want to clean out my mother's house and get rid of the stuff, I am appalled by the number of women who come up to me at a garage sale with an armload of things and make comments like, "My husband is going to kill me, I already have a houseful of this stuff, don't know why I'm buying more?", or "I'll have to wait until my husband goes to bed to sneak this stuff in."  After hearing these comments from people at the garage sale, and incidentally, from people on all the list serves I'm on, from knitters to quilters to doll collectors and costumers, I really wonder about why we all feel we need so much of everything.  We need to think about how big our stashes are, why we buy so much, and how much we are realistically going to accomplish in the rest of our lifetimes.  If you have such a large stash you have to sneak it in, you probably shouldn't be buying more. 

My mother's stash finally grew to the point where family and friends couldn't visit because there wasn't enough room unless the weather was nice enough to be outside.  It was a huge source of contention between my parents at the end.  We couldn't bring either of my parents home for hospice care because there wasn't any room.  She got to the point where she was spending all her available free time trying to liquidate it instead of doing things with family.  She found out how much of a burden acquiring more than you can ever use is.  I don't want to make the same mistake she did, I want to learn from it.

Okay, off my soapbox now.  I have to get to bed early so we can do another garage sale tomorrow. 

~Jane