New Year's Purge

Owning stuff makes me feel anxious.  I hate to shop, and will put off buying even things I really need for as long as possible.  For some reason this gives me a strange sense of satisfaction.  I spent years where everything I owned could fit in the back of a station wagon, and that made me feel safe, secure, contained.  My husband has pack-rat tendencies, and I am so glad that at some point in the course of our decade together he has apparently been infected with my New Year's Purge bug.  Now we both come down with it annually.  Symptoms include a lightening of the heart, soul and spirit when you throw away/give away as much of your stuff as you're willing to get rid of every January.  The more you get rid of, the better you feel!  That's the cure for the bug.

This year is especially exciting because we have a week off together, at home, and a lot of belongings still in boxes from our move in October of 2008.  Wait, is that pathetic?  Whatever, people!  I never claimed to be on top of things around here.  In fact, things are on top of us, literally: stored behind the wall in the attic.  I dragged all the boxes, bags and storage totes around into categories the other day: paperwork, home decor, baby clothes in sizes other than current, and the ever growing To Be Organized pile.  I can't promise we'll make it through the To Be Organized pile.  In fact, I can probably promise that we won't.  However, we will pull whatever crap we are willing to part with from all the various piles, and make a new pile: Salvation Army.

And--oh--that is the sweetest pile of them all.  That pile, my friends, is the only pile who will whisper in my ear the words I long to hear from all my belongings:  You will never need to worry about me again.  No more cleaning, no more fixing, no more purchasing, no more anything.  Just take that space in your head and offer it to the highest bidder honey, because I am not your problem anymore.  And yes, by highest bidder, I mean free.  Cause while daydreams don't pay dividends in cash, their rate of return is higher than anything else in my current portfolio (and that would be true even in an economic upturn).  And if I can toss an outfit that once upon a time told a story about me that turned out not to be true, or a bunch of plastic toys that appear to be interchangeable and fail to light up my son's face like the morning sun to make more space for...well...it almost doesn't matter what the space is for, in the end.  It's the making of the space that's here, in front of me, this week.  It's the making of the space that I must do.

So this week I'll be all:  Aarrgghh!  as I shuffle and shift, poke and prod, pile and then finally, blissfully, toss.

And then I'll be all:  Aaaahhhh!