Emotional Spring Cleaning

lol...

Thank goodness I have my boyfriend here as we finally broke into many boxes that we had in storage, which yielded a lot of emotions as we opened them.

He could, without any emotional attachment, and look at some of things could determine that some things were trash/junk that got mixed up in the boxes due to some fast packing at times. Often the fast packing can be detaching from an old relationship and deciding to move forward, although rather than dealing with going through things at that time, I simply put them in a box to be gone through later. That box wouldn't be opened at each new location... so the memories traveled with it.

Sometimes, it was movers who packed things in weird ways that yielded no real rhyme or reason; and, that box was ignored. For example, I had one box packed up from a home in San Antonio marked "garage". One would presume that, if it was marked "garage" it would yield garage type of things like old tools and such. Since I didn't want to look at tools that was my exes at the time, I just kept moving the box to each new location after moving from there to Houston in 2000 to Austin in 2003 to another location I moved to in Austin in 2006. In 2006, I opened up the box to, decisively, go through his tools to put some in a tool box I finally got and take the rest to Goodwill to be reused by another person needing that type of tool in construction, etc.

Instead, when I opened up the "garage" marked box, I found that the movers had actually packed it with lots of newsprint paper, a trash can, cereal from the pantry in the kitchen, and a huge bag of dog food that had not been opened yet and was stored in the bottom of the pantry in the kitchen. In another words, there was nothing about "garage" at all. With that revelation, I had begun going through boxes one by one.

Today was another such days that my new boyfriend of the last 3 years was staying with me during the weekend. While I was babysitting my granddaughter, he started opening some boxes that have been moved with me to the present location last July. Bless his heart though, because he gave me things that he knew would cause me to have a rush of memories while he continued to unpack the items and repack them, less the trash that had been included in the boxes from the move in San Antonio to Austin.

One of the things he gave me was a notebook that was 3-4 inches thick and spanned at the opening to at least 6 inches because of all the papers, pictures, letters, certificates, awards, accolades, etc. that told about my life story in the first 40 years of my life; a portfolio that I created in a portfolio class in college while working at Southwestern Bell back in the day. He took a break and sat down for a bit for me to talk away and tell him things about me that he never knew.

Now my cleaned apartment that was very clean on Saturday morning is now exploded with boxes and stacks of things all over the place. However, I guess with any amount of thorough Spring Cleaning one does, it is expected for things to look much worse before it gets better -- right??

I keep telling myself that, while it is to have the place appearing that everything is in its place (with storage items in closets), it'll be nice to move forward with life without those mislabeled boxes, etc. It is nice to have good friends with you when you do so that you can have a moment to be reminiscent before moving forward. I think, perhaps, that is the only way to truly have some thorough spring cleaning -- with a trusted friend that will allow you some time to be reminiscent, while keeping you on task so that Spring cleaning seems to be the resulted effect when it is all said and done.

What do you do to get Spring Cleaning done so that you can de-clutter your life of quite so many things in your life? How often do you do your Spring Cleaning? Is it often enough, or does the adage "out of sight, out of mind" play an important role in your life?