I sorted through the closets, bureaus, shelves, and shoe buckets last weekend, and came up with 3 garbage bags full of clothes to take to the Red Cross box. I was surprised to discover that I even had enough clothes to fill 3 garbage bags, much less 3 bags of extra clothes. It's days like this that make me never want to move to another apartment, ever. There's just so much stuff in our apartment, even with all of this sorting and tossing out. And we have way more furniture now than we did when we moved in two and a half years ago. We've bought a couch, two filing cabinets, and three bookshelves, and Stephen has made 3 benches, a kitchen table, a coffee table, a pine cupboard, and a sideboard for the living room. (He's still working on the rocking chair.)It's such a great feeling to get rid of superfluous possessions, though. I'm really into it lately. My mom has been taking advantage of this eagerness to declutter, too. Whenever I visit, she gets a couple of boxes of stuff from my childhood out of the attic, along with a garbage bag, a recycling bin, and a small box for things that I want to keep. I spend the afternoon reliving piano recitals and looking at kindergarten report cards, and throwing a ton of stuff out. It's pretty fun, actually, and I get a great sense of relief/accomplishment from whittling the mountain of memorabilia down to a molehill. I've gone through about half of the stuff that's up there, and the attic pile is now quite manageable.
The apartment smells nice today, like daffodils. Early spring flowers have such a characteristic, heady smell, don't they? We went to the Smith Bulb Show on Sunday afternoon. We arrived late (45 minutes before closing) and the line snaked out of the building and down the road, so our visit was somewhat shorter than I'd hoped, but it was still totally worth the 2 hour drive. Just...flowers, everywhere. Over 1,000 plants in rampant bloom: magnolias, daffodils, tulips, freesia, peonies, hyacinths and anemones, stacked so high on every side that they towered over our heads. People swarmed over the blooms like honey bees. Afterward, we were in such a Spring mood that we went to Herrell's for hot fudge sundaes and got burritos. Then we had to hustle back to Boston to catch The Amazing Race. I love flowers, but I like reality TV a lot, too.
