Two days after Christmas our area of the country was hit with such flooding that even those of us who live above the flood plain were hit. Our basement had 1 1/2 inches of water in it. For a very large basement that meant we lost a lot of things, including items from my mother’s house, which I brought home with me after she died four years ago. I’ve been avoiding those things all this time.

So Mel and I spent New Year’s Day filling a large dumpster with a twenty-year accumulation of “stuff” from our lives and also from my parents’. I never do anything for New Year’s Day, but this year I did and it was painful. Sometimes when you start a new year, you have to learn to let go of some “stuff.”

I went through old books my mother read–she loved Zane Grey and alternative medicine books. It reminded me she was the original herbal enthusiast long before anything like that was popular. She didn’t have a regular family physician, but she did have a chiropractor who helped her plow through herbal supplements available in her day when I was a child. She made green smoothies in the sixties, as well as granola that was quite good. She nagged me to take herbal supplements for my health. And now I’m the health nut.

I went through Mom’s kitchen items such as old bowls, which I now use, and old silverware, some of which I kept and some of which I discarded. One particular fork meant a lot to me because my uncle, who fought in WWII as a Marine, gave us that fork stamped with USMC. Ah, the memories.

When I was little my father, who was a carpenter, built a toy box for me that would hold enough toys for a family of five, and I was an only child. No way could I discard that toy box. I might someday be buried in it.

Mel had to discard a few things, himself. He loves to collect model airplanes, but when those are still in their packages after several years, and those packages lie in the water for too long, they get discarded. He also had to give up on the fact that those automatic kitty litter boxes don’t work, no matter what kind you buy.

It’s painful discarding so many things from our past, but as I cried and carried load after load to the dumpster, I realized that sometimes we have to discard some things from our past in order to make room for our future. And we will look forward to a bright, and less cluttered, future.

What do you need to discard?