Let's talk trash. . .

I've been on a cleaning rampage. Mainly, I've been attacking my storage bin in the depths of my condo. Well not really depths. . just down the back hall from our main lobby.

The "significant other" has a mania about never throwing away the boxes of anything that once held electronics in case you might want to return something, so when I approach the tall metal cage that constitutes my storage bin,the first thing I see is the huge box that once housed my flat screen TV, followed by the fat square boxes that were home to my latest computer and printer.

With the warranty on all the above long since expired, I take a deep breath and trash the lot of them. Wow! That felt good.

Now I begin attacking the mountain of file boxes, all carefully labeled with a black Sharpie in my own handwriting. Organized, I am. Nostalgic. More than a little.

Opening a box labeled "Office Books", I recognize a throwback to my last official office space within Creative Directors Advertisng Agency. Suddenly I realize I actually had a life pre-Google. Here, well-thumbed and well-used, are hard cover copies of Roget's Thesaurus, Webster's Dictionary and Bartlett's Quotations. Also a soft cover copy of Windows for Dummies and a small handbook titled "Conversational Spanish". Not to mention reference books about local and national media, long since out of date.

When was the last time I went to the dictionary on the shelf next to my current desk to look up a word or the phone book to look up an address? Much quicker to click on Google and find the correct spelling or the answer to my most esoteric question. Incredible how dependent I've become on that bit of cyberspace to keep me in the writing loop.

The nostalgia part kicks in as I take more deep breaths and force myself to trash boxes containing files on long ago clients. Stealing a few glances into several of the fat folders on the way to the waste bin, I flash back on close to five decades of my life as a public relations maven.

Other bits of memorabilia remain in the bin. To trash or not to trash. That is the question. A 4 ft. tall pair of glittery cardboard scissors used many times over the years for photo ops at various ribbon-cutting ceremonies. An ancient pair of snow skis, long since replaced by more modern ones. Crutches from when I broke my foot visiting my grandson Adam when he was still in college in Gainsville. And a set of camping cookware from a long ago Thanksgiving hike in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

So when was the last time you took a deep breath and trashed that overstuffed closet or your version of my storage bin? It's fascinating how much we accumulate and how little we really need.

By the way. . anyone out there have a yen for some giant glittery scissors? I really tried, but I just can't get myself to throw them away.
# # #