Cleaning...

I got a good start on cleaning my garage last weekend.  After a reasonable amount of time after Daryl passed, a dear neighbor (who has had to look at our garage for 30 years) said they would be glad to help me clean out the garage this summer.  I have to chuckle because it was probably a statement of  both kindness and desperation to look at something besides my wreck of a garage.  Our houses have no storage, so garages are on-site storage units.  They love me dearly, but probably hated my garage.  :-)

I could actually park a car in there now if I wanted to.  If the driveway were straight...but that's another story.

The interesting thing is what doesn't mean anything to me anymore.  As I look around the house/garage and decide how to streamline my current life, I'm amazed at what things that held such special memories before simply don't have the same meaning to me now.  I am realizing that shared memories make items special.  If the memory has no one to share it with, if nobody was "there" when it became special, it becomes just a thing.

It's a little like losing a piece of my history. 43 years of shared memories, inside jokes, things that were symbols of shared times and events....some things have no one who was there for them except me.  And I find that it was the sharing of life that made stuff fun.  Not the stuff. 

So I am passing some things on to the kids now.  Things that still hold that "essence of Dad" for them.  Because now will be the time that they mean something to them.  And, I find that I can now have shared memories with them.  The stuff is fun again. 

I'm making new memories.  With kids.  With Grandkids.  With friends.   And there are new mementos of these fun times. 

And I have a delightfully cleaner garage!