What is worth saving? I'm about a stack of magazines short of becoming a hoarder....so this is something I must seriously ask myself. Pinterest hasn't helped my hoarding instincts either. What?? You can make beautiful apothecary jars from old pickle jars? Shut-up! And save that pickle jar for me!!! Pendants from bottle caps? I'm never throwing another bottle cap away!!! Paper Quill paintings from toilet paper tubes? SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!!! Stock pile those toilet paper tubes!!! And so it goes.
I've always been a saver. Even as a small child, I had shoe-boxes full of "special rocks" and pine cones. I could never bear to part with a toy....even when it was broken (especially after seeing Rudolph and the Island of Misfit Toys!) I just felt so sorry for the broken toys!! Books were like old friends.....I'd read and re-read them until the covers were ragged. My Little Golden Books were my dearest friends! Old coloring books too.......I didn't want to lose the memories of all the fun I'd had coloring those pictures! Broken crayons were kept in a giant cigar box. As a teenager, I had a giant box under neath my bed. Into that box went every movie ticket stub, every pep-rally ribbon, every straw-paper from every special date....dried corsage flowers, dance tickets, pictures of old boyfriends.....you get the idea. I had them until a few years after I got married. I still have some of them....in my Senior Scrapbook.
When my own kids came along, it wasn't any better. Okay. It probably got worse. Locks of hair from their first haircuts. Baby teeth (Yes. I know it's gross....but I saved them too.) Hospital ID bracelets, birthday cards, baby booties, rattles....and then when they started to school....I kept all their art work, all their homework, their stories, notes sent home from the teacher, report cards and progress reports.....all tucked away into boxes. In my attic right now, there is still a giant box of McDonald's Happy Meal toys. I'm not kidding. I'm not proud either. But I'm not kidding.
When we'd go on vacation, my kids knew that it was Marshall Law that NOTHING was to be thrown away with my express consent. Napkins, straw-papers, place mats, ticket stubs, brochures, theme park maps, tourist magazines, sea shells, even the barf-bags from the airplane.... all of these treasures got tucked into Mom's suitcase and would make their way home and got glued and/or taped onto the pages of my Vacation Scrapbooks. Looking back, they ARE nice keepsakes. But this begs the question.....HOW MANY keepsakes does one need?
I'm not sorry I took tons of photographs of my kids as they grew up. I'm not sorry I glued straw-wrappers and barf-bags into scrapbooks. I'm not sorry I have drawers and drawers and shelves full of scrapbooks and photo albums. I have well-documented our lives and I find immense comfort in spending a lonely rainy afternoon pouring over those scrapbooks and albums and remembering the happy things we've done over the years. Especially now that my children are adults and have flown from my nest.
Maybe my "saving" tendencies grew from being raised by my grandparents, who had lived through the hard times of the Great Depression and saved quite literally EVERYTHING. Zip-lock baggies got washed out and turned inside out over Mason Jars to dry and were reused until they literally lost their zip. Tin Foil was also washed, straightened out and dried and reused until it lost it's shape or crumbled into shiney bits. Butter tubs were our cereal dishes and what Mamaw would use to "put up the vittles" to save them in the fridge when we had left-overs. No Tupperware in our house....we re-used Butter and Cool Whip tubs until they were warped and stained orange on the inside (usually from spaghetti or vegetable soup). My Mamaw would wash out the plastic bags that loaf bread came in and would save the twist-ties too and she would reuse them. She was green before being green was cool!!! She never let anything go to waste!! We washed plastic forks and spoons and reused them too. Gallon milk jugs were washed out and used to tote water down to the garden to water the tomatoes in the summer-time. Old panty-hose were used to shake Seiven Dust on the garden. We even saved the grease from frying bacon and put it in rendering pot to use to "season" our other food! Wrapping paper was never ripped open at our house. It was gently removed at the seams so as not to tear it, so it could be used to wrap another day. Bows and ribbons the same. I think we used the same Christmas bows for 20 years or more. We simply saved EVERYTHING. It's not a bad mentality to have......you know, until the day you wake up and you have bread bags and tinfoil and stacks of magazines piled to the ceiling and you have a 1 foot X 1 foot pathway to walk through your house.
I've seen those hoarder houses. I've had patients in houses like that....houses where I had to squeeze down hallways piled up so high that the stuff just towered over me. It makes you think. And you just know that there's NO WAY they will ever clear all that stuff out. Their kids will just have to torch the place to get rid of all of it some day. Stacks of newspapers going back 50 years......stacks of magazines. Stacks of Cool Whip and butter bowls. Boxes of Happy Meal toys from the late 1980's.
When we moved from our house before this last one, our attic was filled with my old saved things. I managed to narrow over 100 boxes of stuff down to just about 10 boxes of stuff that I just couldn't part with. I'm really trying to be more selective in what I want to keep. I do have some of the kid's things that I will always want to keep. Things like the Christening Gown that my Mamaw sewed for them.....I will not part with that until I have a grandchild and can pass it on . Their baby blankets that she quilted for them. I will save them until I am certain that my kids are responsible grown-ups who won't lose or squander them....then I will turn them over. The keepsakes I have would most likely be considered JUNK to anyone else....things with little to no monetary value.....but to me, they are priceless treasures that I must save.
So, what are things worth saving? It's a matter of the heart. One of my favorite Bible verses when my kids were little was the one about Mary....when the wise men came and when the shepherds came to worship her baby boy.....the Bible says that Mary "treasured these things and pondered them in her heart." I'd almost be willing to bet that Mary had a little box hidden away...a little box with a lock of Jesus' baby curls, perhaps a bit of Frankincense and Myrrh too...and maybe a piece of lamb's wool dropped by one of the sheppherds, and perhaps a pretty rock that glittered in the moonlight that she picked up along the way the night they fled to Egypt..... little things that she saved and she probably pulled those things out on rainy, lonely afternoons when he'd grown up and moved away and she would look at them and ponder the special memories in her mother's heart. I always identified with that verse in this way. Yep. Some things are just worth saving.
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