Paying for the sins of my past
- col-teri-stein
- April 20, 2024
- 813
The day of reckoning has come, and now I’m paying for the sins of my past. Relax. It’s not as juicy as it sounds. I’m on a new cleaning jag at home, and of course, it’s of my own making. It all started with a good idea.
Years ago my husband Joe bought me a wonderful writing desk. But over the years, I’ve added tasks that need to be done to this desk. When internet bill pay became a thing, I moved the bills from my small desk upstairs to my writing desk because there was a computer there. Now we are getting older, and one of the worst things to come with old age is more paper.
Every organization involved with serving people in their old age is sending it to you monthly. I probably could get some of these informational papers online only, but that creates another set of problems aside from the fact I’d probably not even look at them at all.
I tried integrating all this new old-age paperwork with the other tasks on my nice, big writing desk, and it’s a mess — about two years’ worth of a mess, piled up in one huge unfiled stack of papers. It tends to get mixed up with other stuff I’m working on.
Light bulb moment: I should turn the small desk upstairs into the old-age paperwork desk — that way I could get all these papers into one spot, and I have a filing cabinet upstairs too.
But now I had to clean up the small desk, which had become a catchall. And when I went upstairs to scope this out, it was apparent the entire spare room had become a catchall. I had a bad habit of pitching everything into this extra room, especially if I needed to clean up the house quickly.
There was much to do. I had to get heartless with stuff I thought I would save forever.
When I first started writing, the editor would pick up my printed copy each week from my front porch. In the meantime I had started to save clippings of all the stories I had written.
Now I looked around the spare room. There were six large and extra-large notebooks of clippings filed in protective plastic sheets, a bunch in folders, and a bunch to clean out of smaller notebooks. I quit saving clippings years ago, so this stuff had to go. Fortunately, the historical society took it. There is a lot of good information there on community events and interesting people. It would have been hard to just trash it.
I did trash a lot of things though. I had a couple of old notebooks from an organization I was very dedicated to and helped get off the ground. Gone.
My old notes from when I got to interview my humor column idol Dave Barry. Gone. I saved the autographed copies of his books, of course.
My Richard Sterban of the Oak Ridge Boys interview notes and humorist Garrison Keillor notes. Gone and gone.
Writing is sacred, but I trashed some old writing I had done. It was mostly just starts of stories and columns that were no longer relevant — and lots of miscellaneous writing and record-keeping paperwork.
I went through my address card file and tossed about a hundred cards. Many of these former contacts had retired or changed jobs since I made these entries, and unfortunately, many were deceased. I could probably get rid of the physical address card file altogether. The internet and social media make it so much easier to find and contact people.
I would say I’m about 75% finished with this big cleanout, and I still have to organize the old people paperwork. But it’s all going to work out, and it’s good to be on a cleaning streak in the spring.
I’ve vowed to no longer commit sins against my home. And next up, for my penance, those pesky junk drawers.