I spent the first of many afternoons sorting through my mom's possessions at her house.  My mother is a pack rat.  I swear she has never thrown anything away.  Ever.  Broken or not, she keeps it.  She'll tell you it's because she lived through the Depression.  My argument to her is that she was only 9 years old when the stock market crashed, hardly the age of responsibility.  Whatever, that's her excuse.  She's a pack rat. 

Anyway, I put signs up in the mostly cleared living/dining room...Estate sale, Trash, eBay, Recycle, and Keep/Ask.  Then I started sorting.  There was a lot of stuff on the computer desk in the living room so I started there.  Cigar boxes with pay stubs of my father's from the 1950's.  Hospital bills from 1954 marked paid.  Check stubs from the electric coop from the 50's.  Really, I looked at every single piece of paper.  I put the little homemade book of "See Spot Run"  made by Jimmy Wood into the Keep pile.  <g>  Then I opened an old check box, shrieked and dropped it!  I gingerly picked it back up and put the lid back on...it was a shed snake skin.  I put it in the Keep pile, knowing that it could easily have been me that had preserved it so.  You can be sure that every other box/bag/whatever was opened with caution after that. 

So I went through everything in the living/dining room and my mom's bedroom.  Those rooms had been mostly cleared out when the gang moved mom into Lake St. Charles.  Then deciding to go in a clockwise motion, I tackled the north bedroom which was packed from the outside wall in with junk.  Literally packed...there were two dressers in there that probably hadn't been opened in ten to twenty years because there was no room to do so.  There was only enough room to stand just inside the door.  This is the truth.  By the time I finished this afternoon, I had reached the back wall and had cleared off the bed that had been buried for god only knows how many years.  The back corner was scary and I imagined all sorts of weird diseases I'd catch from mouse droppings.  But I cleared the room (except for under the bed) and emptied the drawers of both dressers. 

In the end, I had added a nice bookcase (where did that come from?), a sewing machine cabinet, a small writing desk, two dressers, and misc. things to the Estate Sale pile.  A few small things to the Keep/Ask pile (including Linda's graduation picture framed).  A number of things to the eBay pile to research.  After all, people collect the weirdest things.  And six huge bags of trash to the Trash pile.

After stopping at the first gas station to wash my hands and arms thoroughly, I decided on the way home to skip the whole clockwise thing.  That would mean that the next two rooms would be the largely abandoned (by my mom) junk rooms with really big stuff in them.  I think next time I go out, I'll work on the kitchen.  I anticipate another six bags of trash and a few finds to scout out on eBay.  I'm hoping it won't be quite so dirty or mousy as today's work.  Also, I need to add another sign:  Goodwill. 

Posted by: karen on 3/29/2008 8:07:00 PM , 0 comments