Of Lit Trees and Other Sorting/Packing joys

 This morning I have had a wide variety of decorative trees lit up across my kitchen counter.

 

 

I didn't want to pack them without making sure that all the lights still worked, and then when I plugged them in they were so pretty that I decided to leave them lit up yesterday afternoon and this morning.  Soon I will pack them in a box, and then I will go on and continue packing other items in boxes.

Much of my life revolves around the sorting and packing up boxes these days. Some of this sorting like photographs and childhood memorabilia, I did last year. Some of it like old fiction manuscripts from decades of writing I thought I would be doing this year but come to find out I must have done it last year—they’re not in the closet where I expected to find them. I have looked at poetry notebooks from the last 2 1/2 decades, and a lot of them are going to recycling bin. I have typed out the poems that work.

Once I would have kept these notebooks and gone back and scavenged for old ideas and old lines and reused them. Or at least I would have told myself that I was going to do that. But much like my books, there are always new ideas, and so I rarely circle back.

Once I might have kept these notebooks because they gave me an interesting insight into what captured my attention at the time. But as I get older there is only so much room to store these things. I am keeping all of my handwritten journals. Scraps of old poems and lines that never quite found their way into new poems--those will have to go.

Like my journals, I will keep my sketchbooks, at least for now. I have yet to find a way to digitize those successfully. The colors always look off.

Once I didn't have this problem with accumulating so much stuff. In our younger years, we would move once a year, always in search of a better deal on rent. With each move we would have a yard sale and the sorting.

As I pack things away, I know there is a good chance that in later years, I will wonder why I kept these things. I will donate them or recycle them or throw them in a trash bin.  But for now, it's good to make some decisions and to keep moving forward.