Storing Treasures

I live in a cluttery mess.  All the time. Sometimes it drives me crazy.  Mostly, I am OK with it, because  it could be so much worse than it is!  The practicality of it, is that a person just cannot keep everything.  There isn’t room to store every glossy catalog that comes in the mail, every Sunday School paper, every scrap of yarn, every box a toy is packaged in, and every piece of scratch paper with cute emergent writing scrawled across it.  There isn’t room to store every art project for infinity, which is why I choose the very best and save them in a portfolio for each kidlet.

The Banana has a very, very hard time letting go of things.  She wants to keep everything.  She watches and knows what times I go through the house collecting things for the recycling bin and the wastepaper basket (prime times are right before I start teaching students on my teaching days) and when I leave the room, she dashes over and rescues all the things that I have tossed away.  She hides the loot under the radiators, in closets, corners of the basement, under the cabinet in the bathroom, in nooks and crannies in her room, and she jams things behind dressers and bookcases until they spill over the top.  She searches for yummy snacks in the kitchen and stashes them bit by bit throughout the whole house so she can snack later.  She cannot bear to let go of those beautiful catalogs that show up in the mail, and  is vastly offended at the thought of her scrap papers ending up in the garbage.

The other day she caught me recycling a picture of a nativity scene she made before Christmas (To my credit, I had already kept three nativity pictures).  She wailed.

Me:  But,  Honey, we just can’t keep everything!  We just don’t have room to store every single picture.  We have to just keep our very favorites.

The Banana:  (Sighs, with tears in her eyes).  I know.  I just like them all.  So sometimes I make a big pocket inside my brain.  It’s not really a pocket, but sort of an imaginary pocket, and then when you put things that I really like in the garbage, I stick them in my imaginary pocket and keep them there so I can remember just exactly what they look like.

And then, my friends, I felt terrible.  Simply awful.  Because I’m not a maniacally clean person, and I do keep a lot of stuff.  I just can’t keep it all.  And my girl, she hordes things.