A task sidetracked by memories

It’s a daunting task.

I am not a collector, but you live long enough and you end up collecting things. Scarves that you don’t wear but that someone you love gave to you. Gloves that don’t keep your hands warm, but there’s that someone-you-love thing again. Books that you haven’t yet read, but might, someday. Plaques that say things like “I Said A Prayer For You Today,’’ and “Let’s Party!’’

Handprints your kids made when they really were kids. Greeting cards that go back 50 years. Unlabeled VHS tapes (Could be something important on those tapes. A dance recital. A Little League game!) Floppy disks from old computers. Records at 78, 45, and 33 revolutions per minute. Cookbooks that have never had their binding stretched. School books and scrapbooks and boxes full of souvenirs your kids left behind when they moved out.

Prayer books. Textbooks. Phone books that date back to 1960. And notebooks. Dozens and dozens of notebooks.

I started with the notebooks, because boxes full of them are crowding my office: white reporter notebooks, which I have been using for 35 years.

They live in cardboard boxes, 2006 mixed in with 1985 and 1992 and 2001.

The wheat from the chaff. That was my goal. That’s all I had to do. Look inside these notebooks, give them a cursory read and decide what to keep and file, and what to throw way.

But it’s all daunting. Cleaning up and organizing, staying focused and on task - impossible, because here’s the thing. You cannot look through notebooks or greeting cards or books or records or even a drawer full of scarves without losing your direction.

You may be aiming for the future, eyes on a clutter-free tomorrow, heart in the right direction, but then you stumble upon a sentence, or a signature, or remember a song and where you were and who you were when you first heard it. Or you hold a knitted scarf in your hands and see the sweet 11-year-old who knitted it for you, her first real scarf, and all of a sudden you’re not looking at the future anymore, you’re not even in the present. You’ve been hijacked to Memory Lane.

I made it through at least 40 notebooks, Memory Lane slowing me down some but not derailing me. I was a time traveler, here, there, and everywhere, but on point, tossing out more than I kept. I was on a roll.

But then I found a quote whose source sent me to the computer, where I couldn’t find what I was searching for but noticed, in the process, that I had hundreds of duplicate photographs taking up space on my hard drive. So I started deleting to make way for the new there.

And that’s how it goes. You start cleaning out one thing and you end up cleaning out another.

So here I am still, trying to purge the past to make space for the future. I am holding 2011’s Christmas cards. Keep them or toss them? I’ve read them. They’re done.

But I look at all the family photos, at the handwritten wishes, at the cheery Christmas letters, and I cannot throw them away. And so I put them in an under-the-bed plastic container where years of old Christmas cards live.

And I think, there’s room for the past in the future. And, for at least this day, I give up trying to organize and reread all the old cards instead.

Canton resident Beverly Beckham can be reached at bevbeckham@aol.com.