Packrat or no?

I got a call today from Dave.  His mother was married to Dad until he died.  Priscilla has moved to Denver to be closer to her sons and Dave is cleaning out her house, shipping her furniture out to her and getting rid of everything else.  There were a few things left in the house that they thought our family might want so in the process of all this, they set aside a few boxes.  I went in to get them this evening.  Good heavens, more books! 

And rock collections!  Dad had saved the rock collection I assembled when I was in 6th grade.  The rocks are still labeled and sorted out into their little spaces.  Oh my goodness.  I'm awfully thankful that Carol is teaching 6th grade and might be able to make use of these in one of her units.  I'm also thankful that Mom and Dad didn't save my dead insect collection.  Oh, that was back in the days of t-pins and dead bugs.  All neatly labeled and stuck to boards.  I can not believe that I did that project.  It just makes me shudder thinking about it.  Mom and I spent a lot of time in the outdoors that year with a butterfly net.  Blech.

There is a box filled with Grandpa Greenwood's sermons.  Another box filled with old Guidepost magazines for Carol.  Another box filled with very, very old small group studies.  What in the world am I going to do with that crap?  However, Max might enjoy the strange tracts that I found in yet another box. There were a few treasures amongst the crap.  Tomorrow night I'll go back in and finish going through Dad's filing cabinets. 

I did tell Dave that Carol and I were terrified Priscilla would go first and after Dad died we'd be responsible for dealing with her immense houseful of junk!  He's had a garage sale, completely filled a 10 cubic yard dumpster, plans on a second dumpster and will be moving stuff to his house for her and off to his niece's house as well.  There were paths moving through her home because of the incredible amount of 'stuff' she had. 

Max and I have tried to purge our house of the extraneous stuff that we have laying around.  It doesn't go quite as planned when it happens, but one of these days we'll have it whittled down so that Carol doesn't have to panic at the thought of us dying in some hideous accident, leaving her with a household of stuff that she doesn't know what to do with. 

Both Dad and Priscilla were terrible packrats.  I managed to take on that terrible habit for the first 40 years of my life.  Any bit of sentimental meaning meant that it had to stay in my world.  The scary thing has been looking at things that obviously meant something to me twenty years ago and not having any idea what that might have been. 

Do you collect or purge?