I have always held firmly to the adage “less is more” in every area of life, except where concerning the acquisition and consumption of dark chocolate. The Husband, on the other hand, prefers to live by the saying “too much is never enough.”
I am a thrower-awayer. I feel peace and contentment when ridding our house of excess stuff – paper, old clothes, unused appliances, bits and pieces of questionable origin. Making more space gives me great joy.
The Husband is a keep-er. Besides reaching a state of agitation if he can’t find something he knows he saved, his favorite accomplishment is to fix something using a piece of plastic or hardware that he’s hung onto for 15-20 years (it is true, though, that he’s saved us a fortune doing just that over the years).
Both of us are right. And both of us are wrong. I have been known to throw away or recycle items that were eventually discovered to be absolutely vital to the continuation of life as we know it. He creates piles of paperwork and miscellaneous detritus so tall, on every available horizontal surface, that I’m afraid to go near them for fear of suffocating under the avalanche should they topple.
Then again, I’ve caught myself saving a few items recently that are not strictly necessary for survival…the notes the two girls wrote as they were trying to get the proportional measurements right for the blancmange they’d been meaning to make all summer:
Personally, I find that if a recipe requires math, it’s not worth it. Just open a package of Oreos. I’ll admit, though, the blancmange was delicious.
And the photo of The Boy that he used to cover up the hole he knocked in the hallway wall, just above the baseboard, while running internet cable to his bedroom (surprisingly, I found this incident and its attempted cover-up hilarious and left the photo where it was):
Note the inexpert trimming job that in no way says, “don’t look down here at the hole in the wall.”
So, it seems that things change…people change. And I find that the longer the kids are gone, the more I appreciate the strange little odds and ends they left at home. Let’s just hope I manage eventually to let them go…or maybe you should look for our house in a future episode of “Hoarders.”
Mom Goes On 