Stuff -- No really.... Stuff!

I spent most of my day today de-cluttering. This is no small feat for me. I am married to a packrat, and am a bit of one myself. We have also managed to raise two OTHER packrats, and lordamercy at the STUFF we accumulate.

My weakness is paperwork. I am my father's daughter, and I worked for him for a number of years. His work mantra was, "Leave a paper trail of everything you do." Computers were just coming into play -- finally affordable enough for small businesses to use -- and he had a love/hate relationship with them. On one hand, you could cut down on the time it took to record sales, compile reports to the state, know at the touch of a button exactly how much inventory was in the warehouse and in the drums. (The family business was oil distribution.)

But on the other hand, unless you kept a really outstanding paper trail, you rested your trust in a floppy piece of material, which in those days was huge and very fragile.

So, "PAPER TRAIL" rang though my ears every day there and I took it to heart a little too seriously.

Honey, I could use the clutter I tossed today to make a trail of paper from here to Belize, which is where I'd like to go anyway. Just for a visit.

BUT -- and here's the point of this for me -- some of that stuff represented little pieces of my life. Time spent waiting for a child to have a spinal tap that would show he didn't have meningitis after all (hospital bill), filing our first tax return as a married couple (Lord, we were poor), a confrontation with a professor in college over a grade I received for a paper marked with a "B" ("It was 'A' work for anybody else, Miss Upchurch, but I graded you against yourself, and it wasn't your best.")

I wonder now if I'll ever sit in a chair again like I did today, reliving these moments, without the pieces of paper, and now I'm getting a little teary...

Oh dear Gussie.