Here we are, at around 8 in the morning on the thirty-fourth day of 2015. That’s as close as you can get to one-third of the way through the first hundred days of the year. And how am I doing with the enormous cleanup project?
Some progress, and a lot of running in place. There’s some good news since I gave up on carefully spelled out plans and started just doing the most obvious things first. I’ve recycled piles of paper bigger than I am, and thrown out a smaller but impressive amount of junk that can’t be recycled. Nice.
I’m sure my grandmother knew who she was…
The bad news? That was all stuff that we brought home from my mother’s house; boxes and boxes of old papers. Junk mail ads that my mother stuffed into plastic grocery bags and never disposed of. Birthday cards and phone bills that my grandmother received or paid in 1964. Photos of people I can’t identify, taken decades before I was born. (Actually, I haven’t persuaded myself to throw out the old photos yet.) And sorting all this paperwork is no fun at all when you’re allergic to dust.
Worst of all, when I clear out one batch of boxes that’s making it hard to walk around the living room, that doesn’t mean I’ve freed up any space. No. It means we can unload more boxes from the back of the car and lug them inside to sort.
Of course, the original idea of this project was to spend a hundred days getting rid of things I’ve been saving for no good reason. How am I doing with my own stuff, the things I should have thrown out years ago? Well, I’m not making much progress with the excess paperwork and books and clothes and who-knows-what that was here anyway. Most days, I don’t find time to deal with any of my own mountain of trash.
This might wind up being the two hundred day cleanup.
A Number of Things 