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Eskimos use refrigerators to keep food from freezing.
And Now You Do
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19:4, Wealth maketh many friends; but the poor is separated from his neighbour.
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Foxtales: GATHERING AND TOSSING
Posted on Friday, June 25 @ 16:44:25 EDT by Webmaster
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What About All This Stuff?
How on earth did I accumulate all this stuff? I wonder as I sit here, how many others have asked themselves that same question. I sometimes wonder why we don’t all realize that the accumulation is growing and growing as it is doing so. Why does there have to come a day of reckoning when we realize that something must be done about all this! Were we just irrational before the day of reckoning?
Goodwill?
Heavens to Betsy, my grandmother used to say at such a time. I’ve never before now in my life had a truck come to my house to pick up my cast offs. Well, of course not! I was too busy going to the Goodwill and Salvation Army to gather their treasures for myself to take home and gloat over and treasure in disbelief that the things cost so little.
Some of us are gatherers and keepers, and some are gatherers, but also eventual tossers that pass their treasures on to the Goodwill so someone else can get a big thrill. Of course, those people bought their items brand spanking new, enjoyed them for a while, then passed them on. (Tossed them, in other words.) “Paying It Forward” if you will. Geeze, the mere thought of “tossing” gives me the heeby jebbies; I kid you not!
I grew up in Kerens, Texas, a very “Small Town America Place“ where folks who had gone through the Great Depression” usually said, “Better keep it, you might need it someday!” My grandmother always said that to me each time she put the thing she told me to hang on to in her cedar chest. You cannot believe all the goodies she had in there. She’d even keep pieces of string, and wound the varying lengths on a piece of cardboard. Rubber bands were kept handy, of course, because they were necessities for pony tails, which were a must in the fifties. When she was ready to turn an old garment that was no longer useful to her, into a dust rag, she first cut all the buttons off, and took the zipper out.
Thank God for Grandmothers!
In those days the teen age girls rolled their hair with bobby pins. When I’d hurriedly do my chores, I’d always sweep everything lying on the floor out the back door, and most of that time, it included enough bobby pins to roll my hair after a few sweepings. I’ve always dropped things on the floor, and not picked them up as I went along, just sweeping them right out. A bad habit I admit, but I still have that blemish firmly fixed in my list of shortcomings. Now, I can’t even bend to pick up things on the floor from a wheel chair.
See how time changes things? Now I have a legitimate excuse.
My grandmother lived with us in what I always called ‘the big white house” that was once the Methodist parsonage. I would often see my sweet grandmother outside the back door bending down and picking up the bobby pins…sometimes blowing the dirt from them. I guess I would have to say here that I always “flew by the seat of my pants“, never having much time to dress and roll my hair, always procrastinating. “My Bigmother” would accumulate the pins and on the sly and put them under her dresser scarf, waiting patiently for one of my frantic cries, “Biggie, do you have any bobby pins?” She always came to my rescue. These things are what endears our grandmothers to us. The special things they do, no matter how small.
When I’m trying to make excuses for my “over gathering of belongings”, (some might call OCD) I make an attempt to say that it was because of my grandmother’s influence. She lived through the depression, I told myself, so she had to save everything in case she needed it later. A lot of our parents and grandparents made it through the depression, and they too, learned to save and cut back. I, however, created my own predicament by my tendency for being a pack rat.. Hum, I wonder if that shows up in our DNA? My entire family seems to hold onto things that have clearly outlived their usefullness. I used to be a perfectionist to a fault. Time changes everything.
All of us to some extent, have that human frailty to keep, collect, and treasure things. Thrift stores were my weakest link. For a five year period, I had the time, the independence, the mobility, and the money to peruse all my favorite haunts in town. I retired as an interior decorator for a large interior design firm. I wasn’t accredited, of course, and came into the title without my framed certificate stating that I had a full fledged degree, therefore having earned my
A.S.I.D. status. {Once I coveted having both a PhD, and an ASID, but that went away when I realized it was a pipe dream. (I do believe in having goals and dreams, though!} I just changed my mind about what was important to me.
When I started putting more time into my writing, I no longer had those cravings. I truthfully don’t think I liked going to school all that much. It was too structured for my avant-garde personality. I have an inflated impression of those who have accomplished those degrees, with the parchment paper complete with gold seal framed proudly on their wall. Facing the facts staring blatantly back at me, I have to admit. “I just didn’t want to do the work!” Not that I didn’t want to be highly educated, I did; so I set about educating myself after high school. It has it’s perks, for sure. I only perused and studied the things that appealed to me the most. I know a lot about those things, and very little about the things that didn’t hold my interest; about par for the course for one who was wrongly diagnosed as bi-polar, but later found out I had Adult ADD. Not so surprising to a woman who has always kicked her left foot to get rid of the excess energy stored up, and who could only focus intensely on a thing for a short time, without needing to switch to something else. But oh, what intensity the short time held for the thing of the moment. Lol.
At age 71, the tendency to gather, and gather and gather, and keep forever, has softened a lot. First, the ill-health that came on 26 years ago, and picked up other infirmities along the way as willing passengers, gave way to the fact of not driving anymore, not renewing my driver’s license, walking first with a cane, then two canes, then a walker with four wheels, and, finally, confined to a wheelchair most of the time. The not driving has squelched my feverish trips to thrift stores, discount stores, or any stores at all. That sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? It hasn’t been at all that bad, actually. I no longer have the desire to shop at all…except online on my computer. Most of the time I don’t go “out” over twelve times a year. {The Holidays, and one big party at the Petroleum club every December with my wonderful, and loyal friends (eight of them)...a tradition established many years ago, and one I look forward to very much!) Oh yeah, I have to get blood work every three months and see the doctor. This is my social life in a nutshell. There have been outings I hadn’t planned, that come along way too often for me….trips to the ER by ambulance. That’s negative, and I haven’t reserved space for those things on purpose. I am fine as I am today, believe that or not. I still have to have similar help from my mate like that given me by grandmother so many years ago, because I still wait until the last minute to start getting ready, and I still “fly by the seat of my pants“. Lol. Aukey brings my hot rollers to the bed and plugs them in, along with makeup, and all the other things necessary for me to get ready to go to the places I HAVE to go, but mostly I am content as I am.
There is an addendum to this story.
I am constantly gathering my things together these days…not to keep….but to give away. Yes, to the Salvation Army and Leukemia Society that have thrift stores. Now, trucks do pull up in front of my house to take my over-flow away, while I’m still holding up a pair of very sexy black, high heel party shoes with rhinestone clip, trying to talk myself into finding a reason to keep them. I don’t find one, so Aukey gently removes them from my hands, and says, “Auk, you’ll never wear those shoes again….let them go. There is a time to gather, and a time to let go. That time has come.
And so it is!
Blessings
Sandra Simmons Fox
aukey@sbcglobal.net
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