Out With the Old

It's that time of year again:  the annual NotHannah Family Get All the Crap Out of Here to Make Room for More Crap GetRidAThon.  The kids were gifted but good this year for Christmas AND we still have several gift cards waiting to bring more joy into the house, so out a bunch of stuff went:

• Little People sets and board books to Mr. E (my newest nephew)
• an antique table that I love but is simply gathering dust and cluttering up the foyer to my mother-in-law or sister-in-law
• more books and vases and decorative bowls and Happy Meal toys and stuffed animals and a grilled cheese sandwich maker (really?  I mean...how hard is it to fricking make a grilled cheese sandwich?) to the Goodwill
• tons of papers and scraps of artwork and "keepsakes" and fol-de-rol that I've been hanging on to dumped in the trash or the recycling bins

Undecorating for Christmas and tossing (removing...reLEASING?) old stuff is always bittersweet.  Most of the items we box up or ship off were used with love or in times of happiness, and so it hurts a little to get rid of them, even as their removal brings a certain lightness to the house.  I was feeling a wee pensive last night as I cleared off my desk (again.  For the 80th blue million time.  My resolutions for this year totally center around finally taming my spaces...) and then I found it:  my college day planner.

I bought it at the beginning of my last year at UGA, when I was feeling quite impressed with myself that I would graduate and stuff.  (Little did I know then that I would be plagued with indecision and financial woes and a blizzard of panic attacks that would render me pretty much useless for doing anything but watching Days of Our Lives and making my would-be husband anxious about asking him to marry me.  Good times...) It's covered with a dark, swirly, tapestryesque fabric, still holding up after all these years.

I have meant to throw it out for years.  But I haven't been able to, because it's filled with my past:

• The dead guy's name, but not his number or address, because he moved right when I got the planner and then I lost the planner for a while and then he moved again and then, you know, he died.
• The dead guy's family's addresses and numbers.  I haven't used the addresses and numbers for years and they don't work now, anyway.  
• The numbers for UGA's student affairs and financial aid offices, for the Dean of the English Department, for the Records department.  Haven't used those numbers in a while, either, although I've been pining to go back to Athens and learn them all over again, lately.  (Fall is hard on alumni of beautiful schools surrounded by funky little shops and fielding decent football teams.)
• The addresses of and directions to about seventeen places where Moglet lived in Atlanta.  One listing says "Moglet the Urban Adventurer."  
• The addresses of G and A when they lived not On the Mountain and when they didn't have kids.
• The addresses of tons of friends who are no longer married, or no longer straight, or no longer alive.  Or who are still married and straight and alive, but who are married to different people or living in different houses or using different phones.
• Several attempts by myself to figure out the best signature for my married self.  My old, unmarried signature.
• Notes to myself about getting records, about grading tests (I used it my first years of teaching, too), about buying cat food.

I couldn't get rid of those, could I?  This little book was a history of myself, a chapter of the girl I was before  I became the woman I am.  

But...I have pictures of those times.  And good friends I can call up to remind myself of them.  And, dude.  I married that guy with the anxiety and had kids with him and so pretty much any time I want to, I can go up to him and say, "Remember when I had all those panic attacks?" And he can say, "Yeah, that sucked.  Can you clean up the laundry room?"

And then I'll get all pissy because he's ruining my trip down memory lane and I'll call up Miss Mary (who ALSO remembers the panicky-attack girl) and we'll bitch about husbands a while (because we know that we love ours and so bitching about them to each other is perfectly legal and healthy) and then she'll remind me of how far I've come and how awesome my life is and so...really...why do I need that little tapestry-covered day planner?

I don't.  That's the simple answer and the reason why I chunked it in the trash can and forced myself not to take it out of the can all night long.  It's the reason why, when I realized that Will had taken out the trash, that I didn't freak out.

I mean, I might have cried a little, but I didn't freak out.

Much.

I'll probably be incommunicado (again...heh) for the next few days, but I'll be back in the new year with a cool scrapbooking giveaway, some home improvement twaddle, and lots more blathering.  Check out the Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/NotHannah) if you feel like you can't live without hourly updates about threatening candy or Grinches or my odd children.  

Luff y'all and Happy New Year!