Cleaning out the closet.

It's really hot out today, and I don't feel like getting physical, so I decided to tackle a sedentary but necessary task: cleaning out the mysterious folders and boxes and Stuff in the back closets.




Today (and probably all weekend) I am going through the large red rope file folders from the top shelf of the back bedroom closet. HOLY SHIT, this is a job. I had to take a break, because I was getting frustrated by the chaos. They are a jumble of everything under the sun - I found postcards in Italian written in 1958 and random pictures my late husband took overseas while he was in the USAF, before we met, mixed with pictures of Boy as an infant and Girl's 3rd birthday party, and Bailey the dog and Abigail the cat, and moving day shots of three different houses we owned, and the whales at Sea World and random unidentified zoo animals. That was just in the first of five or six bulging folders, and Kee-rist, this is a job and a half. I've decided I'm going to create boxes for each family member and just sort the stuff by featured person: Me, each kid, their dad, and the grandparents will each have a box of photos. And I need to make time to scan some of this stuff, because unfortunately some of the 30 year old snapshots are beginning to fade, and the ones that are older are in even worse shape. The Polaroids didn't hold up well at all.

I found a picture of me in the pool at our old house, with the two kids and my mother. I think Girl would have been a year old then, when the pool was brand new. (I can tell because the screened porch wasn't installed yet.)

I remember how "fat" I felt then, after having two kids - looking at the picture I have to laugh - I look perfectly skinny and fit, though for me, at that time, it was "fat." I wish the current me could talk to the me of 25 years ago - current Me could tell that Me that I had a great body and quit worrying about it and enjoy it, and that Me could warn current Me that I was about to throw it away via decades of sitting on my ass and eating supersized portions, and after putting on 30 pounds over the years, it will become an endless battle to fight my way back to when I felt so "fat." Le Heavy Sigh....

This afternoon, the space shuttle Atlantis left on its final mission - they are starting to retire the fleet. I snapped this a half second after the solid rockets dropped off, Le Too-Slow-on-the-Shutter Sigh....