Holidailies: Change is in the Air

You don't appreciate just how much you miss home until you have spent 4 days away from it. Four days in an environment that is toxic and strange, festive and odd, rife with relatives and smoochey pooches, all rolled into one. Suddenly, no matter how messy and chaotic home may be, life seems easier. Easier, that is, if you aren't sadistic like me. You see, I could spend the remaining two weeks of my vacation resting, relaxing and recouperating so I am refreshed (and alliteratively attractive) for the rest of the school year. But instead I am cleaning. No, I am decluttering, which is suddenly a world apart from simply tidying ariund the mounds of stuff that accumulates over the course of the year.

Several times during the year I am struck with an urge to purge and change the layout of our place. I get incredibly fed up with trying to stuff toys in overflowing bins, to wade through papers that seem to breed overnight into mountains, which then become landslides. So I grab some garbage bags and go nuts. Since I am usually upset and angry while I am doing it (a result of trying to avoid landslides and overflowing) things are thrown away with little regard for sentimental reasons. I feel less inclined to mushy feelings when I am already gripped by hotter emotions, I suppose.

So when we arived back home and I tried in vain to simply find new crevices to force the gargantuan Christmas haul (you know, the one that filled the van we rented to capacity and we stillhad to leave things behind). Looking around at all the stuff made me almost physically sick. So it began. The last great purge of 2005. I am now over 4 garbage bags filled with stuff and only two rooms sorted through. It feels good and liberating, but also disgustingly commercial as I go through it all. No one should have this much to waste when others go without so badly.

In the past, with the pack rat tendencies that I am trying to break free from, it was incredibly difficult to do this sort of cleaning. It took hours of reading each little piece of paper, oohing over old trinkets, sighing over past remembrances. But the hours in my life are getting too precious to spend that way anymore and I am ruthless about what I need and what I can do without carrying around. There are murmurings in the air about change and I need to prepare myself for it.

I am all about change, it is one of the hallmarks of my existence and I am not afraid of changing to suit the needs of my life. But. It does require somewhat of a preparatory season. So as I shed the trappings of one lifestyle and try to move into a cleaner, more streamlined style of living, I purge on. And as we approach the coming year, already ripe with excited possibilities and somewhat scary prospects, I am changing, inside and out.