Have you ever had a task that is hanging over your head – taunting you and making you just not want to start it because it is so overwhelming? My file cabinet was just that task and I am happy to report that I lived through the cleaning out and organizing of it this weekend.

Getting this house and our possessions downsized is a continuing process as we continue to wait for that perfect buyer. We went hard and heavy for over 6 weeks and are continuing on in a slower style now between showings and life. But there is still plenty to do and the file cabinet in my room was one of those things I was putting off because it was not something that was really seen when the house was being shown.

It ended up not being nearly as bad as I had anticipated. How many jobs have I tackled that I dreaded that ended up just that exact same way? I work myself up about attacking a task and make it larger than it actually is. Fortunately for me I had already gone through the files and cleaned much out earlier but I still needed to weed through stuff and get rid of none needed documents and items.

The shredder was kept humming and I gathered a huge black garbage bag of shredded papers and that felt good. Gone were those papers that were no longer needed. Of course I found some things that took me awhile to read and decide yay or no.

One such item was a newspaper article from The Globe Gazette which featured the North Iowa Bloggers group that I was a part of. This particular time was when we held a pizza tasting event at my house and it was a lot of fun to vote on our favorite pizzas. We were known for our taste tests over the years — any time we could get together we would and if it involved different flavored Oreos or Lay’s Potato Chips all the better. This group of friends was an important part of my life in Iowa and I am still close to many of them today.

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Of course I found files belonging to both of the boys (not to mention the four totes in the garage that have stuff from their childhood as well). Now those take a bit of time to go through because they are pretty darn sentimental and emotional. This was from an autobiography of Aaron’s when he was in third grade and stated that he wanted to be a pianist. Well, he tickles a different kind of keyboard today for his profession but this mad made me giggle.

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Important papers and memories — all filed together.

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I found an article about Chris when he went to work for CSR Sugar in Australia.

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And finally, something that made me smile. Long, long ago when my mom’s dementia first started to make itself known to all of us, she had difficulty with keeping her medications straight and taking them at the right time. I had this brilliant idea to created a check list that she could check off to keep herself on track about taking her meds. I was so naive but it was done out of love. Of course it did not really work, we ended up calling her at various times during the day to check on if she had taken her pills, etc. but I had the best of intentions. When I saw the chart that I had kept all these years it reminded me of her and of course that brought a smile to my face.

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So this task is done but tomorrow there will be another and that will be followed by another. So many things to clear out and so many memories that are being stirred up but how wonderful to have those memories of a life that has been pretty darn great.

Thanks for coming along today on my file cabinet cleaning. Hope you have a great day. Remember – you are loved.