I am painting several rooms in my home, including the living and master bedroom. Painting is the easy part. The hard part is moving everything out of the way to find the walls. I did some sorting and recycling, but I mostly did what my father calls a "crap transplant:" you take a pile of unsorted junk mail, meeting notes and whatnot, and move it to another place untouched.
One of the largest piles of stuff is artwork done my kids. I don't know why I feel compelled to keep so much of their stuff, even after it lived long past its shelf date. There are art projects that are broken or have fallen into a state of disrepair that I no longer recognize what it was originally supposed to be.
This week, I started to jettison some of the stuff. I found a shoe box painted orange and green. I have no idea what it was supposed to be, yet I kept this shoe box in my room for years. Why did I keep this stuff? Was I holding on to this in case my kids one day became president and this could be added to their files? I am sure that would be a big hit -- random and unidentifiable stuff from elementary school. I don't even know which kid painted this box, so I doubt the presidential library would take it.
I started to think What would this say about my kids? What would people learn about them from this project? The answer would be that their mother was a quasi-hoarder, unable to throw out things that have fallen apart. This was not the story I wanted to tell, which made the trips to the recycling bin easier and more frequent.
This blog is about the little and big thoughts that pop into my head. I once read that when Flannery O'Connor walked into a bookstore, she would want to edit her published works with a red pen. In the digital world, we have the luxury of tweaking things up after we've hit the publish button. I can be a perfectionist/procrastinator, where waiting for the ideal means little gets done. Here I will share what is not--and likely will never be--perfect.
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