I’ve been spending lots of free hours this week working on our (only) finished basement room. It’s lined with built-in bookshelves on one side, has carpet and a couple glass block windows, a phone line and a closet. It was a perfectly serviceable home office when we moved in, but was abandoned by my husband when he got a new office out of the house, and has steadily deteriorated into a storage space for stereo components that don’t work, boxes of memorabilia, old magazines, and lots of photos and picture frames we intend to marry to one another, some day. It was a disaster.
On a hot day it’s the most comfortable room in the house, and of course it’s where we hang out when the sirens go off, but I don’t think that’s why I started work on it now. I think mainly I felt the need to do something dramatic and visible. Throwing stuff out, or at least boxing up stuff that we’re not ready to throw out, feels great. So much of my mothering life is doing the same things over and over again. Half of my pastoring life is like that too, and the other half is attending meetings where lots of ideas and visions are discussed but visible change is still far off on the horizon. Cleaning out a room feels GREAT, and since the room isn’t used much right now, there’s little danger it will all get messed up again in 24 hours.
We have lots of boxes of memorabilia down there – love letters (mostly to each other), graduation programs, journals and LOTS of pictures. I have such a hard time keeping up with the current influx of pictures of our kids that I can’t imagine when I’ll have time to DO anything with these boxes. I’ve come to the brink of throwing them out altogether – I mean, when will I look at them? Will my children or grandchildren be the ones to finally go through it all? Will they wonder who ¾ of the people in the pictures are? Will they even bother, or just get a dumpster and be done with it?
I feel terrible for having accumulated so much, but then I think, well, I’m not 20 anymore. It’s not as if I’ll have enough lifetime to have 5 times this many boxes when I’m all done, or even 3 times. Then again, now that I have kids my nostalgia for my high school years has pretty much vanished. If I’m going to spend hours combing through old photos and clippings, it will be of 2001 and 2002, when our preschooler was moving from 5 pounds to 10. Those are the days that now seem the most fleeting, even if they were only 4 years ago. It is true that a lifetime is not measured in years so much as love.
