In which I am purging

It's sunny and almost warm here; the daffodils and pear trees are blooming, so that means it's time to THROW STUFF OUT. I did a major clean-out in December--it was my coping mechanism for dealing with the loss of Emma the Yellow Wonder Dog--so there isn't that much to purge. I'm down to the last bastions of clutter, the things you think you miiiiiiiight need so you hang onto them with a kung-fu grip that would make GI Joe proud. This week I cleared out the memorabilia boxes--three bins of cards, letters, photos, certificates, baby bracelets, etc. We have HALF of a bin left, and we've gotten rid of enough old greeting cards to wallpaper a house. HONESTLY. Looking at that pile and adding up what we've spent over the years on pieces of thick paper embossed with glitter and sticky with sentiment was embarrassing. At the very least I could have scored a pair of good shoes out of the deal. I mean REALLY good shoes--we are a card-happy people. But since greeting cards have climbed upward in price, it's gotten to be more of a nuisance to buy them and more of a guilt-ridden activity to throw them out.

So they linger, behind refrigerator magnets and tucked into calendars, until someone furtively slips them into the garbage or recycling bin. It's enough to make a girl lose her ever-lovin' mind. The most beautiful of the cards I cut down into bookmarks, then I purged my bookmarks. Remember when Amazon used to give a free bookmark or two in every order? Yeah, I had DOZENS of those suckers. Now I have a collection of gorgeous bookmarks, most of which are fragments of famous paintings and have a snippet of a loved one's handwriting on the back. And best of all, I had enough space left over in the living room closet to put THREE LINEAR FEET of coats in there. Do you know what this means for my own closet? It can breathe again. I swear I heard my dresses sigh in relief when I pulled those coats out.

Living with coats is a new phenomenon for us. In South Texas, you have one coat and it usually isn't even lined. You wear it three days out of the year, complain LOUDLY about the bitter cold coming down the plains, blame the Oklahomans for it, and then put it back in the closet until the next twenty-minute cold snap the following February. Here in Virginia, you need coats for the following conditions: cool, cool and rainy, cold, cold and rainy, VERY COLD, and cold but turning warmer. And then you need multiples of some of those because there are few things more unpleasant than pulling on a damp coat. (Unpleasant on a scale of "things you'd rather not do on a cold morning", not unpleasant in the way that war or famine is unpleasant, of course.)

Anyway, the memorabilia is purged down to just the very best stuff, the coats have a place to live, the dresses can breathe again, and I'm looking around for what to tackle next...