Letting Things Go

[sartorias]

There is a wave of decluttering going through various social media now, sparking some results people are either finding satisfying or dismaying. I haven't read any books about it or watched any shows only because I already tackled the complicated feelings about it some years ago, about the time that I realized that, nope, I can't call myself middle

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[shirebound]

Same with the clothes that I love that I'll never get into again.

I have a pair of shorts buried in a drawer that I just can't bring myself to get rid of, even though my waist will *never* be that tiny again. *sigh* I'm proud of you for doing a bag at a time, and I hope you are, too.

[sartorias]

It's always a relief to get rid of that bag, yeppers!

Yeah, totally understand.

[whswhs]

So far the two hardest things for me, both when we moved from two bedrooms to one, have been giving away the Encycopaedia Britannica (a marvelous work, but I virtually never looked at it any more) and getting rid of 90% of our comics collection. The comics had been in a storage garage and we weren't keeping the garage. . . . I've thinned the books, and we need to do that again, but it's really hard.

[sartorias]

It IS hard. We have a beautiful Britannica set . . . 25 years out of date now, and no one looks at it.

[whswhs]

Ours was older than that, but large parts of it were not out of date: The history, the literary and artistic history, even the classical physics. But the things I wanted to look up either could be found online, or needed me to visit a university library (for example, finding out how well different animals saw). I just wasn't taking the Britannica off the shelf any more.

On the other hand, I'm still holding onto the Oxford Unabridged in two volumes with magnifying glass. I'm not ready to let that one go yet.

[sartorias]

Me too, with my OED. It will be one of the last things to go!