Free at last! I'm free at last!

I've spent the last two weeks cleaning out closets, taking bags of clothes and boxes of books to Goodwill, and looking forward to moving on to the next closet or file cabinet to purge.

I could have sworn I did a thorough culling last year, but from the looks of my closets and other storage areas, I was wrong.

This year, though, I'm doing it the way it needs to be done. Gone are dresses I haven't worn in at least ten years, gone are outworn sweaters, gone is my beloved LL Bean toggle coat that hadn't seen the light of day for a good 20 years, I bet.

I spent one entire morning sorting through pantyhose and tights. I must've checked 50 pairs, one by one, to see if the elasticized tops are still good (most weren't) and if there were any runs. I threw away at least half of the stockings and wonder why I even kept the other half. Probably four good pair is all I need, given my new retired lifestyle and, ahem, casual daily outfits.

Parting with books is always hard for me, but this year I'm doing that, too. I'm keeping my very favorites, the ones I can't live without, but now at Goodwill are novels I read once, liked fine, but never intend to read again. I even convinced Ken to relieve his bookshelves of several books today. He didn't do as thorough a job as I would have done, but he's new at this business of de-cluttering so I'm cutting him some slack.

I claimed, last year, that I'd finally parted with my teaching materials. That was only half true. I did throw out the student projects stored in a large bin upstairs in the huge closet behind the bathroom,...but I still hadn't thrown out the files and files and files of teaching materials, lesson plans, AP English practice tests....
Today I finally found the courage and mind-set to get rid of all of that stuff. It was taking up so much space, and why on earth was I hanging onto it?

My hanging files in the drawer here beside me are now, for the most part, empty. I'll soon fill them with my knitting patterns, sewing patterns, and the like.

Even harder than parting with my teaching materials is parting with my quilt magazines. I have two huge boxes of Quilt, Quilt World, Quilters' Newsletter, and every other quilting magazine published during my quilting phase, late '70s to late '80s. I hate like the dickens to throw them out, because they contain wonderful photos of beautiful quilts and many quilting patterns. I checked out eBay yesterday to see if there seems to be a market for them, and there doesn't. Dilemma. But they're not taking up space in my closet any longer. No sirree.

I discovered a secret cache of Christmas magazines in one box, so secret that even I didn't realize they were there. I don't need them. I quickly thumbed through each one to see if there might be a pattern I couldn't live without. I found a pattern for a little cloth doll, so I tore it out but will probably never make it.

I'm not sure how much longer my cleaning/decluttering binge will last, but I'm on a high and I'm not eager to come down from it.

Mother Nature, meanwhile, has thrown us a curve ball today. I guess it's a curve ball. I know nothing about baseball and wouldn't know a curve ball if it were coming straight at me, but today's heavy snowstorm has put us back into the middle of winter in one fell swoop. Here we'd been enjoying signs of spring, despite the cold temperatures. Spring birds were returning and singing about their winters in the tropics, the sun is giving us longer hours of daylight, but a foot of new snow, with the storm showing no signs of letting up, is what I see outside the window at the moment.

I'd better keep my mind on my sorting-and-throwing and let Mother Nature take care of the goings-on outside, I guess. Eventually she'll come around and give us the spring we're wanting so desperately.