Clutter Wars: Mom Liked Pussy Willows, Files, Neighborhood Clutter

My mom's house and garage are a great stimulus to clean out our own stuff and we're working on it daily.  But the inflow of paper courtesy of the US mail makes it a never ending process.

But then there's stuff that has meaning.  For instance, my mom loved pussy willows and had bunches of dried pussy willows in vases around the house when she died.  My heartless friends saved me lots of agonizing decision making by glaring at me and pointing to the garden recycling bin in LA.  (Thank you, really.)

But as I wandered our snow free yard recently, I couldn't help but break off some fresh pussy willows.  There's a reason my mom like them.





So I put them in a vase in the bathroom.



Then I saw the little glass bowl where I've put the even littler blue velvet bag with some of my mom's ashes.  Since my mom like the pussy willows, I thought I'd put her next to them.

I understand this could seem rather bizarre, but having a bit of my mom nearby gives me some sense of normalcy, that she's still around.  I can share things with her that she would like.  Fortunately, I have no sense of her being there when I wouldn't want her watching me.   She always gave me lots of space and freedom and never guilted me over things.  That was a great gift.

As I said, I've been tackling old paperwork, sorting through files upon files.  One pile is for direct transit to the recycling bin.  (I've been removing this pile before getting more files, so there was a lot more than just this.)  Another pile has to be shredded first - anything with identifiers, particularly social security numbers.

As you can see in the picture, there are a lot of empty folders too.  Some go to recycling, some I might reuse.

And there are things to sort through more carefully.  For instance, I found a small envelope from my father with a handwritten label, "Some poetry Steve might enjoy reading."   There's insight to parts of my father's life we never discussed when he was alive.  And then there's a poem called "Heimweh."  Only the title is in German (it means homesick).  It's about suddenly thinking about his childhood home and how it made him cry..  (His aunt in Chicago helped him secure a visa so he could flee Nazi Germany, but he was never able to secure visas to get his parents out.)   The last stanza gives some justification for keeping some of this stuff.

"I shed my tears in agony
for I was mourning,
      but in vain,
since all the world that
      used to be
will never be again"

My father lives here still with me, through his poems, his old letters, some of his things and documents.  This document was in the same folder with the poems.

It fills in bits and pieces of his life I knew very little about.  This was in files I'd glanced through after he died and knew enough to keep for sorting later.  Later is here, I guess.  It's back into another keep and look through later pile.  But I'm getting rid of a lot of the stuff that is just taking up room.  And while the historian/archeologist in me would keep all the old income tax folders and checkbooks, because they do document the times I lived and how we spent money and how much things cost, my mom's garage screams out at me to just shred it.  

Here's the nearly empty file cabinet where all this came from.  There are some folders I still need to go through and sort more carefully, but this does feel like I've accomplished something.







And then I walked around the block to get some fresh air and was reminded that my clutter level wasn't all that bad.







Here's the house that burned last month.

And here's another neighbor's backyard.  

And front yard.





Stuff!!  Glad I don't have to clean out their yard and house.