Trashing My Childhood

According to my mother, one of the things I had to do before leaving Colorado this summer was to sift through and sort all of my childhood memories. Since leaving home, I have left any and everything I didn't want to lug around in the basement of my parents' house. This was the first time, I had really looked through any of it, probably since I put it there well over 10 years ago. Some of the things in the boxes were dated 1978! I actually enjoyed looking through the things I (or my mom) had saved. The bulletin board full of soccer patches. My tattered kitty cat with the embroidered heart. A school project on Abigail Adams. Collages from my closest high school friends. A book dedicated to me. It was so hard to decide what to keep and what to let go. Of course, some of it was just trash and I couldn't even remember why I had kept it in the first place. Eventually I decided I had to simply purge and ended up throwing most of it away. I put a few things aside - yearbooks, photo albums, special awards - but I hauled most of it up to my parents' sidewalk and left it in the rain, waiting for the garbage man to take it away, leaving me with only memories.