If you were to set foot into my office these days, you would find the following: One crazed-looking woman surrounded by multiple manila envelopes of varying sizes, piles of photographs laying about on every surface, empty and old photo albums propped up on the floor against every piece of office furniture, scraps of paper strewn about on the floor, and the smallish, under-the-desk waste basket filled to overflowing with discarded pictures.
I'm in the midst of what I refer to as my "Insanity Project" - an undertaking that needed to be undertaken but now that I am undertaking the endeavor I'm seriously questioning whether or not this was a good idea......which is a rhetorical question. I KNOW this needed to be started and I have done a masterful job of avoiding it for months, but it was time for the "rubber to meet the road".
Well, the "rubber did meet the road" and, as I wrote in a previous posting a week or so ago, "the truck stops here". While in Phase I, I have now emptied thirty-six file folders, fifteen photo albums, three scrapbooks, photo envelopes too numerous to mention and thrown away hundreds, maybe thousands, of old pictures. (Phase II will involve going through all of the generational photos, archived in Rubbermaid bins, from my parents and their ancestors.) I am almost over feeling guilty about all of the people who have been dissed in discarded pictures and I am trying to get over feeling guilty about throwing out all of my children's quarterly grade reports from Kindergarten through high school. The college years are another matter. Other than the fact that Capt. SO and I attended college graduations for Offspring A and B, there is no official record that our two children ever set foot on a college or university campus because they were both legal-aged adults when they "went away" and, therefore, no transcripts ever were mailed to the parents. Funny how that works.
Anyway, I digress.
Tonight, as I made yet another trek down to the storage closet to fetch more photo albums (I think there are ten left), one of the albums I brought up was the album of Capt. SO's and my wedding. The usual routine, in my Insanity Project, would be to settle into my desk chair, album on my lap, and start the disassembling process, which is exactly what I did. I opened up the official album and lo, I could not (yet) bring myself to wrench all of the marriage pictures from the safety of each page. This album just may be the most difficult to tear apart.....as if by removing the pictures from each page it would somehow what??????? Dissolve the marriage?????? Silly, I know, but I will need to chew on this for a few days. I'll confer with Capt. SO and see what his viewpoint is.
If you come across me, in a public setting, over the next few weeks and you note a certain wild, disheveled look about me or in my eyes, please cut me a little slack. A hug would be appreciated due to the wide range of emotions this process is taking me through......sometimes all within a thirty-minute time frame. I can easily go from oohing and aahing about how cute the kids were, to having tears run down my face because there are no do-overs, to laughing when remembering the circumstances surrounding a particular photograph, to trying to swallow away the huge lump that suddenly grew in my throat.
My manila mania will continue until my Insanity Project is completed. I suspect this is not the last blog posting on the project. I hope can tolerate my reflectivity.
Ancora imparo
