quiltersmuse.com Blog

If you are at all like me, you let “things” pile up. What starts out as a small pile of pieces of paper that are important to save, for whatever reason of the moment, becomes a burgeoning, falling over pile of pulp product. Magazines, old letters, receipts, announcements, advertisements… Oh my, the pile of papers that are generated. (The only thing that gets taken care of right away are the bills. I pay them the day they come in, lest they get lost in the shuffle of other paperwork!)
Then the fine day comes along when it is TIME to clean. Usually, I end up going through magazines and I still can’t part with them. Each has a tip, or a good article, or a pattern I might try someday…if I live to be 180!

It is hard to let go of things, that I know, but when do things become an obsession? Now that, my friend is the scary part.

My mother was a saver. I have always thought it had something to do with having lived through the Great Depression. She saved aluminum pans, she washed the plastic “throw away” dishes until they were too disreputable to use again. She saved used egg cartons, presumably to give to a neighbor who had hens. She saved newspapers and magazines, and old clothes, and broken toys, and, and, and…everything else.

When it fell upon my shoulders to “clean out” her house so it could be sold to raise money to pay the nursing home, we cleaned like the devil was chasing us. Sometimes, when I go to antique stores, I do think that some of the old things we threw away were actually better than what is offered for sale, in some cases. In other cases, someone may have picked our roadside dump bags!
Trying to sort one’s own stuff is one thing. We can have reasons for keeping this or that. The task is simply awful when one has to sort through somebody else’s junk. Truth of the matter is that it may not be junk, but it sure seems like it when decision after decision has to be made of whether to keep, whether to toss, or whether to enshrine as a family memento.

My goal is to start getting rid of excess paperwork. The piles are bothering me. Oh, yes, I do have file cabinets. They are jammed full. I have to get busy.

I don’t generally make New Year’s resolutions, but if I had one wish that might come true in the next year, it would be to get a handle on the paperwork, the books, and the fabric, and to attempt to get organized. Anyone care to join me by organizing your own things?

Patricia

Today, I am thinking about the children’s story, “The Turtle and The Hare,” the point of which is that “slow and steady wins the race.” Are you a turtle, or are you a hare?

Most of us have a lot to do. We try to accomplish tasks quickly, especially if someone else is paying us to do them. In business, “time is money.” Said another way, “You snooze, you lose.”

In the course of our common need to earn enough $$ to survive, concurrently, we seem to sacrifice civilities that were once the common expectation in most families. One case in point is the family meal.
When is the last time your family sat down together for a meal, and leisurely ate? The American family meal seems to be becoming a relic of the past. Food is gulped down without barely tasting it because children have to be ushered off to go to athletic games, lessons of all kinds, play rehearsals, and other activities. So, people eat on the run. They “grab a sandwich,” or they stop at a fast food restaurant to fill up on burgers and fries and shakes and deep-fried pies and then they wonder why Americans are often overweight. Somehow, the frantic racing around  they do and the  expenditure of kinetic energy seemingly does nothing to reduce their weight.

In an ideal world, everything could be done at a more pleasant pace. In the competitive world that we live in, there is an unspoken pressure to “be all that we can be,” and for our children, as well, to do it “all.”

In looking back to my own childhood, I am happy that I could enjoy just being a kid. There was a stream that ran through our back lot. I would sit by that stream for hours, fascinated by the dragonflies that would land on the skunk cabbage, and all the little frogs and creatures I would see there.

I would “borrow” a pie plate from my mother. In those days, there was a bakery truck that came around and sold Wonder Bread and Blueberry Pies in reusable tins that could be turned in, when the truck came again. If I would catch it just right, I could take one of the tins and “make a choke cherry pie” with the berries and mud. I even had a special name for the concoction, which, for the life of me, I cannot remember.

A particular activity that I really enjoyed was playing “house” by draping blankets over the aluminum clothesline and pretending it was a tent. In the better weather, I would play in the sand. In the wintry weather, I would build snowmen, and one year, my brother helped me to make an Igloo that we could actually sit in. Too cool!
What I am getting at, is that the fun I had as a kid, was self-generated. I did not rely on the television and in fact, watched it very little, although we did have one. My two brothers were usually plunked in front of the tube watching their favorite shows.

Kids today could not imagine a world without their own computers, their video games, their “piercings,” their tattoos, their Ipods, and the list goes on and on.

The older I get, the more I long for the simpler times like the days that I once knew, when the pediatrician visited sick kids…at home. Days when the pharmacist knew your name. Days when no one would ever suspect a man of the cloth to be a pedophile. Days when going for an ice cream sundae at Woolworth’s, with Mom, was just the cat’s meow. Days when I could own a little turtle and not be afraid of dying of salmonella poisoning.

When all is said and done, I think I prefer the turtle mentality. Whether we speed up and travel faster or not, ultimately, the same fate awaits us all. I prefer to take my waking slowly, and work in a steady, thought-filled manner, each day. When I worked for a salary, I used to be a “hare,” trying to be superwoman and get as much as I could done, in a day, but now that I am older and have only myself to account to, for any loss or gain, I am a “turtle.” Yes, “Slow and steady wins the race.”
Patricia