Cleaning Out Cupboards (and bags and boxes)

   As Beloved Child continues to enjoy her free time before heading off to her summer job, I am looking through the piles of accumulated "stuff" that has landed in the basement and on the porch, detritus from when she has "cleaned her room".    I put "cleaned her room" in quotation marks because when she sorts through her things she cannot bear to actually throw anything out. Instead she puts it in a bag or a box and leaves it somewhere else in the house.  

     Finding one (or more) of these bags or boxes is like opening a time capsule.  There are little girl journals with the first page or two written on.  There are craft projects abandoned before completion.  There are decks of tiny cards, stubs of crayons, costume jewelry and innumerable stocking stuffers from Christmases gone by, all jumbled in with single mittens and abandoned hair ribbons.

    I am pawing through these bags of memories, trying to see what can be mailed to friends' who have littler girls and deciding what is just trash and must, finally, be tossed out.  I found a ball of yarn that she spun on her spinning wheel. Hmmm... can't through that out.  The box she made in middle school shop class...is that also a must keep?  And so it goes, an hour goes by and I have to stop.  I need more garbage bags and a plastic tote box for the things that I cannot yet consign to the dump.

    It is a hot, summer day here.  Beloved Child is at the beach with friends.
                                                       I am wandering through the past.   Peacefully.