Bits and Pieces

I'm taking a break from cleaning out the office.  It has piled up hugely since I didn't really get a chance to clean it out properly last summer.  So far, I've just about uncovered the long work surface counter.  I probably have about an hour's more to go before it can be used again, and I need another several hours of putting up shelves and hanging things before it is like I want it.  I need to make a trip to Lowe's to buy some supplies before I can complete the project.

As I sorted through the endless mounds of paper that had accumulated over the last two school years, I stopped to look at some of the stuff that I laid hands on.  I found a graduation program from the class of 2008.  I found a stack of timed essays from an AP class from 2009 written on Their Eyes Were Watching God.  I found a collection of poetry I wrote for a class at MSU my junior year, and the last paper I wrote at MSU Meridian for a Shakespeare course just a couple of years ago.

It's amazing how all that stuff gets mixed together, stacks up along with the inevitable (for me, anyway) books and other bits and pieces of life.  I've smiled over cards and things I bought on trips I've taken, made folders of paper mementos from Italy, Kentucky, tried to file all the things that I kept because I thought I'd want them some day.  Many things that I had put into stacks, though, I am now simply throwing away, wondering why I ever thought them so crucial in the first place.  It feels good to take a whole stack of something and toss it.  It feels cleansing.

So I'm filing and sorting, throwing and away and holding in reserve, trying to bring useful order to the chaos.  I need that room to be a place I can actually get stuff done and find stuff in as opposed to a place I run in and try not to look at too closely before running out of again.  I already have a huge garbage bag of stuff I'm tossing, so I think that's probably a good start.  Of course, by the end of next school year, it may all be piled back up to the ceiling again, but at least I'll know that I tried....