This whole unpacking of boxes in the garage and general removing unnecessary stuff from my house thing is not becoming easier for me. However, I am still doing it! Yes! And that’s why I honestly think someone should give me a gold star or something. So, I made myself an award on Bitmoji. I’m very proud of this award.
What keeps me going?
Certainly the lifting of heavy boxes of books and empty CD cases (Lee’s) is not a motivating factor. The heat isn’t helping (though it isn’t bad in the garage). Yeah, having more space in the garage is nice, but the real thrill is…
Our stuff!
Oh my gosh, have I found treasures! I’m so glad I unpacked some yesterday, after that frustrating day with my new laptop. I mainly did it because Anita looked so disappointed when I asked if I could put it off until tomorrow (I’d wanted to go swimming).
But we both let out a huge squeal when checking the first box of books to see if it was trash or treasure. There was the rest of our teenage publishing efforts, hiding in the same plastic sleeves it had been in since like 1973.
You can quickly figure out two things very quickly from the W.H.O. (punctuation required) books. One is that I have never been a very good artist, but I did love trying.
The other is that, while our writing was clearly in the 9th-grader range of sentence structure, vocabulary, and inside humor, the two authors were most assuredly doomed to be in the writing and publishing field in some way. Look at that table of contents! Look at the excellent titles, page numbers, and typesetting (typing)!
You really don’t want to read the three volumes of Weird Happy stories, but Anita and I still treasure them. It’s what bonded us as weird, short teens who did NOT grow up in the town we suddenly found ourselves in. Living in our fantasy worlds of imaginary characters is probably what got us through a lot of teen angst. And typing on cheap paper was about all we could afford, too.
And More Stuff
You can tell my poor son Kynan’s mom was a writer, too. If he ever asks for it, he can have a copy of my detailed journal of his first two years of life. At least he will know that his parents and their friends loved him very much. And he was an entirely charming child who was a pleasure to learn how to parent. I do miss that boy!
I have to say I packed a lot of activity into my stay-at-home mom gig.
Then, I also found pretty much every academic achievement I ever achieved noted on high-quality paper. I’m sharing just a couple of things here, but I’m really glad to know I got an AA degree the year before I got my BA degree. I must have dawdled on some prerequisite. I do believe it was biology, which I ended up adoring.
I’m certainly NOT going to toss any boxes without checking to see what’s in them, even though I think I have actually found all the truly sentimental stuff. Who knows what other stuff of Anita’s was hiding in my guest room all those years?
The Hermits' Rest 