Freedom

I slept well last night. I was pooped. 'Hurricane Carol' hit my house with gale-force winds yesterday. She tells me that I am a packrat with a heart. She's right. It's not that I buy or try to collect a ton of stuff, mostly people give it to me and I can't get rid of it. But, I've been at the end of my rope for awhile and have been ready to purge. Yesterday, it began.

When I tell you that you have no idea how much stuff is in my house, you might think that I'm exaggerating. I'm not. It's incredible. I've lived in this place for nearly 19 years. My friends have been generous with me over the years (read: I get gifts that turn into stuff), my father began passing on family memories to me, before that I had accepted my mother's kitchen and life into my world and then my grandmother's kitchen stuff into my world. Carol has managed to move into smaller places every time she moves and I absorb more things when that happens (we don't mean for it to happen, it just does!). Max is the worst packrat I've ever met. I don't think the man understands the word 'trash.' If you know me at all, you know that is the one thing that I could pound him for ... but, I digress.

I'm going to go look at a cute little house on Saturday. The rent is higher than we are used to paying, but no one gets away with what I have gotten away with for 19 years. I've been darned lucky. By the time we're ready to move (whether it's this place or another), I hope to be down to nearly nothing.

Carol and I filled the back of my Jeep with stuff for Goodwill, the backseat with boxes for the storage unit (oh yeah ... there's more stuff from my world). After we got rid of that, we came back and Max showed up. So, we filled the back again with an incredible amount of computer parts, cases, etc. that we are taking to my nephews this evening. Jim said 'bring it.' Again, he has no idea how much he is getting. The back seat is filled with books that I'm going to take to my friends at church. I have another huge load of stuff for Goodwill that is being collected into a space so that it can go tomorrow and we're gathering more boxes and tubs for the storage unit.

Several years ago, Carol came over for a weekend and we did an immense purge of stuff - much of it to a 20 cubic yard dumpster. I don't have quite that much trash now ... it's just things that need to be in other people's lives.

I received this quote in my email this morning, "We have very little, so we have nothing to be preoccupied with. The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have, the more free you are." --Mother Teresa

She's right. Well, of course she is.