Since I've done a lot of living, I've done a lot of sorting and purging. I've moved 26 times - twenty-six! And with that, things have had to go.
Even when I'm not in the process of moving, I'm purging. I like things to be neat, so, on occasion... too many occasions I hate to admit ... I'll toss something that I later regret tossing - dinner plates, books, you name it. Many of the books that I regretted tossing I've been able to order from Amazon; the dinner plates that I sold at a yard sale and later regretted came back to me from my youngest son who searched for the pattern and bought me some.
But perhaps my biggest regret of things that I've discarded were the boxes of Yankee Kitchen recipes that my mother had stored under her bed. When a life is lost there are so many decisions to be made and things to go through that we often don't consider the importance of each item.
Coincidently, my mother, who lived through the depression, was well-aware of scarcity. And I believe it's for that reason that she kept so much stuff. She used to quote the last line of this poem frequently:
