Spring Cleaning or Spring Hoarding?

Have you ever cleaned a room with a four year-old?  Toys that are never played with are still on the shelves, frequently played with toys scatter the floor and the missing toys hover just under-reach beneath the bed and in the back of the closet.  Everything is a treasure.  Everything is irreplaceable.  Everything is needed.  Everything needs to be loved and they are the only ones who can do the loving properly.

Believe me, the hours my mom spent with me cleaning my bedroom were not only exasperating for her, but for me as well.  My space was invaded by brown paper bags in which things I had not seen in months were tossed haphazardly.  Naturally, those things which I had forgotten about were suddenly most desirable.  New adventures were to be had and good memories clung to them like whispers of spiderweb.  If I saw my mom placing something in the paper bag near her knees it was definitely my business to defend whatever it was that was on its way to Goodwill.  It's an unsaid rule about playthings, the owner must fight for their rights to stay despite all good intentions of 'thinning the toys'.

Those paper bags had to be taken out as soon as they were full and stored as if they held Santa gifts.  If I ever caught sight of them and the treasures from my room that they held you could guarantee that the whole bag would find itself back in my room, mixed and camouflaged among my other toys, releasing two hours of fighting and reasoning into oblivion.  I would even pull things from the trash.  My favorite shoes that I couldn't wear in public and weren't suited for my home wear of bare feet.  Of course, after they were hidden in my closet so that my mom wouldn't know that I had pulled them from the trash and unable to wear them for the same reason, they would grow too small and end up in the same bucket as the other nonburnable, unrecyclable objects of the house.

I have been cleaning our little duplex of anything that I haven't looked at within the past year or have no intentions of using.  Out goes a handful of clothes, books, sample size lotions and body gels, and miscellaneous baby items that others hadn't used and therefore had been passed onto us.  Never mind that I hadn't been able to use them, either, and have too much pride to hand them off to someone else.  So they end their rotation as the DI with a price sticker slapped to their sides.

Clutter bothers me like a pesky fly that generally buzzes aimlessly around the living room.  Occasionally blundering into the window, bouncing back, and sometimes getting close to my head for comfort.  While it really doesn't bother anyone because its out of the way, it's still there.  Just like clutter.  It's out of the way on purpose.  Because it has no purpose.  But it's not out of the house.

I have my fall like anyone, sentimental things add up by the box load, but they all have memories attached to them.  They deserve to be sifted through every once in-awhile.  The hardest thing sometimes is deciding which things are actually sentimental and deserve the storage space and which things you merely remember where you got them so they stay.  One way to combat this I have found is that if it has no home as far as storage goes then it should have no home in the house.  If something is so unidentifiable and it has no other like items then it should be on its way.  Often sentimental things find their ways to other sentimentalities and they reside together in a box together.  Things that are just hanging around never really find a place to reside and perhaps they get tossed in a box with other unlike things, but that is the only thing they all have in common.

I've pretty much cleared everything of my own out and don't dare start anything by touching the boxes that sit downstairs of Steven's things that he has never gone through but has a nagging feeling that it's stuff that shouldn't be tossed.  On his account, we did spend three hours in the basement a few weeks ago going through things and his five boxes were downsized to three.  Whether that was because he packed things better or actually tossed a few things in my ever-growing DI bag we may never know.

I was sorting through our books a few weeks ago and making place for the novels that I love, I may have put some of his college books (that I know have never been opened for more than the required reading) in a brown paper bag in the closet, their first step toward the DI.  They weren't taken fast enough and they have been dug from the grave and now reside downstairs.  Every time something like this happens I remind Steven that whatever goes down must come back up.  Someday he's going to regret having box after box of never read books when he's lugging them up from the basement and paying for transportation space to our new home.  But we will discuss that when the time comes.

Right now I am just worried that my Spring Cleaning is becoming more like Spring Hoarding.  Two paper sacks to DI can easily become 1/2 sack if I ever let Steven peak into their depths.  I am not looking forward to the day when Alaska is pulling items out of my DI paper bags and insisting that she needs every single item.  I am going to need to practice shortening my turn-over time and getting those bags straight on their way to other people's hands and most likely their basements.