Sunday, March 27, 2011

Spring cleaning

I LOVE spring. The crisp scent in the air, the mud, the deceptively sunny days that are surprisingly cold when you step outside.

I made it through this winter, and it is somehow more and less of a surprise than I expected. I wasn't on any medications this year. When my doctor suggested I taper off last fall, I was terrified and told him no. Mere weeks later I discovered that I was suffering from side effects and he changed my medicine and I went crazy. Okay, perhaps that is a little harsh. But the new med, it made me sick. It made me feel like I was wildly careening from sane to batshit crazy and back again in seconds. And, frankly, the withdrawal from that drug was worse than the drug. So bad, in fact, I told the doc I was ready to go it alone.

And it was fine. I felt the normal ups and downs of winter, although I suspect they are more intense than most people. Still, I was ok.

Now it's spring, and I am feeling the sunshine. My mojo is back -- at least until the next cloudy day. I am cleaning, organizing, purging -- eliminating all that excess stuff from my life. The church rummage sale is in 3 weeks and I hope to bring an entire van load. Or two.

Tomorrow Evan and I will paint his bedroom, and Tuesday all 3 boys and I will hit the storage unit to clean things out, find some of our treasures, and begin emptying it, because by the end of June I want to be done paying that ridiculous $100 a month.

What went today? About 4 dozen 3.5 inch floppy disks. A box of photos to be mailed to my aunt. Another box, this time of scrapbooking supplies, to go to a charity I love. About 50 textbooks (Goodwill takes them and nothing goes to waste so if they don't sell them they are recycled). Several cardboard boxes. Rob cleaned up his work room, purging who knows what. It feels good.

This week, I will find stuff in storage -- shoes I have missed, art from the living and dining rooms, kitchen towels I stuck in storage to free up a drawer but that I need now, the magnet boards we bought the boys to keep their ever-growing collection of travel souvenirs, sheet sets that will immediately go the the rummage pile, an antique settee that I miss and want back in my living room -- but only the stuff I love and need comes back.

I am still in mourning for my grandma and her stuff. Things are not the way she would have wanted them. But they are the way she chose for them to be. I learned a lesson in this. Avoiding difficult decisions does not mean that the decision points won't someday arrive; it just means that someone else makes the decisions.

I decide. Difficult or not, I am the decider. It's started -- I just have to carry it through.

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