New Beginnings

Mom passed on December 6th, at home, surrounded by her family. More about that later, when I’ve had time to process it better, but this. This picture shows a good depiction at where I’m at right now.

After Mom died, we emptied her apartment into my house and garage. She was not sentimental about things, and they moved so much that she purged belongings on a regular basis, so although it was a two bedroom apartment, it wasn’t as much stuff as it could have been. That being said, it was a LOT. It completely takes over half of our garage, and spilled into our sunroom and my office. It was chaos, more than usual.

I started slowly, because trying to sort through stuff during a period of fresh grief is hard. I had my boys put all the media stuff into the office. My dad was a communications and electronics guy. There were probably a couple of hundred 8mm home movies and video tapes to go through, as well as videos that hadn’t been copied from the camcorder tape, cassettes, photos, slides, and on and on and on. I ordered two boxes from Legacybox, and am having the family stuff digitized, so everyone has a copy. There’s nowhere in Indiana to recycle VCR tapes, so I ordered a box from Green Disk and have it nearly full. You can almost walk in the office now without fear of losing a limb — note I said almost. Hubby still won’t go in there.

We switched out TVs and took Mom’s new smart TV — that ended up being something of a pain, because we couldn’t get the internet to work on it for a while, despite my tech support son’s hard work. Next day, I googled it and got resolution to the problem, but we still have the old TV and stand in the sunroom. Baby steps.

I’ve passed along some things through our local FB Buy Nothing group. If you haven’t indulged in this group, it’s a great way to get rid of stuff that someone else may need. You can also get stuff there, or even borrow. The only catch is that it absolutely must be free. I gave away Dad’s shower chair, two walkers, their microwave, and some odds and ends. It was nice to be able to bless people in their season of need. I very rarely use it to get things, but it’s great for giving stuff away.

And so, on to this picture. This is my computer “tower”. It is in what I’m calling her “my” office, but it’s actually my husband’s office that he doesn’t use. (Mine is chock full of sewing patterns.) This area was piled as high as the printer with stuff. It really only took me about half an hour to process the stuff, but meantime, I found a pattern I had misplaced that someone was interested in, as well as the forms I filled out last year, fighting with the post office over a package that arrived empty in the buyers’ mailbox (if you live in Ohio, there’s a 1940s corset floating around there in a post office). Some stuff got moved to a different pile to be filed, but for the most part, everything is taken care of.

I needed this today. After the last few months and all of the life and death crises I’ve dealt with, I needed a clean space. Yes, that’s a bobblehead Pope Francis. No, I’m not Catholic. He just makes me happy. The jar of pins behind him is a collection of pins that I started last year, harvested as I count pattern pieces. It makes me happy too — I feel connected to the original owners of my vintage patterns.

So yes, I’m going into Christmas with a clean slate, no matter how small it is, but it gives me peace and is helping to keep me sane, even while I have an undecorated Christmas tree up and nothing wrapped.

Here’s hoping that you find peace in the holiday season as well. Next, I will tell you about my plans for the new year.