Mementos Come Last
Woman in the Middle | September 28, 2015According to “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” you are to leave mementos until last, because they are the hardest to sort. The author explains that after you have sorted everything else in your house, you will be such a sorting expert that you will have the skills necessary to sort that more difficult of categories – mementos. The other suggestion is to set photos and mementos aside as you find them so you can deal with them last.
If I did that, my livingroom would currently be piled floor to ceiling with photos and mementos. That is what happens when you are the last man standing, so to speak, in your family. I am the holder of all family photos from my grandmother, my mother and father, and my brother. All those bits and pieces of furniture, the little knick knacks and such, are all in my house. Oh boy! This doesn’t even count the stuff we have from Mom-in-laws and our own personal family photos and such.
In other words, I have mementos everywhere in this house. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t look like an episode of Horders, but the bits and pieces are everywhere.
Happily, at least some of the photos are now digital. The wonderful thing about digital cameras is that the bad photos we take can be quickly deleted or just take up hard drive space. But we didn’t get a digital camera until 2009. Both of my children’s childhoods were recorded on film. Lots and lots of film. Many of those shots were put in carefully crafted photo albums that no one looks at. The rest, all those second copies, blurry photos, or the ones where someone blinked, currently reside in nine photo storage boxes.
I plan on going through the old photos to weed out enough to eliminate a box or two. I know, wishful thinking, but I must have goals! Meanwhile, in spite of what the book says, I have been dealing with mementos as I find them. Otherwise I would be a basket case. We aren’t talking about just vacation photos here. But, slowly but surely, things are getting sorted and weeded, even if I do ignore the infamous book’s advice at times!
Yes I am also glad that all the terrible photos I take can be easily deleted. we have come so far with cameras. I have a lot of photos on my hard drive and a heap on cd’s that I want to transfer onto a flash drive