Shedding clutter… a moving tale of family history
The Jollyman Letters family history project has been buried lately – under a load of clutter.
You see, we’re moving house soon, and it’s time to shed some of this junk to make the house more saleable.
And I must confess, I’ve been a bit… well… enthusiastic about our need to get rid of unnecessary items.
Okay, perhaps ‘obnoxious, strident and aggressive’ is a more accurate description, to be honest.
We’re down-sizing, so we can’t take everything.
The house was already over-full, as our whole family are world champion collectors of everything from Pokemon cards to sewing materials, and we were also storing lots of left-over toys from the shop we used to own.
The shed was stuffed to bursting with the best selection of dangerous rusty old tools you could ever wish for, several bikes and a lifetime’s supply of ‘useful pieces of wood’.
The whole attic – and it’s enormous, the size of our house – was crammed with mementoes of times we couldn’t remember, clothes that didn’t fit, every piece of schoolwork our kids produced since they first picked up a crayon to the time they left college and a whole bunch of other junk we really didn’t need.
We didn’t look at it, we didn’t use it, we didn’t need it. It had to go.
We’ve filled bags and bags with rubbish, until our dustmen were starting to make jokes about the Everest-sized mounds awaiting them each week.
We’ve taken boxes of junk to boot sales, piles of goodies to charity shops, carloads of broken furniture to the tip.
It’s great. We’re actually able to see the floor in some of our rooms now.
Only… today I made a big mistake.
I took a load of junk to the tip, and one of the things I put in was a detailed model building made by one of our kids. We hesitated over it, but it took up a lot of space, and it was delicate, so it would probably get broken during the move. And it wasn’t like we ever looked at it. So we admired it one last time, took photos of it, and put it out to go.
And as soon as I got back from the tip, we both realised we should have kept it anyway, no matter what. But it’s too late – it’s gone.
And it made me realise something.
What if someone had thrown out the Jollyman Letters years ago?
After all, it wasn’t like anyone ever read them. They were only old bits of paper stuffed in a box in the attic.
A vital piece of our family history would have been lost forever.
So I’m determined to be extra-careful not to make that mistake again, even if it means taking the whole blooming lot and storing it in a long row of sheds in the garden.
We’ll get rid of the rubbish – but we’ll keep the precious memories.
