Do You Want A Trip Down Memory Lane?

Clean out a few closets!!

This is what I've been doing for the past week. We're getting new carpet in all of our bedrooms and playroom. Yes, I am very excited about this, but considering that the closets are part of the bedrooms, they have to be cleared out. Now, I am not a trashy, cluttered person, but my closets tend to get that way. I guess most people are the same way, otherwise, our secrets wouldn't be called "sketetons in our closets"!

Whatever amount of time it should take to go through any given closet doubles as I get sucked into to photo albums, old purses, boxes, scrapbooks, old shoes(yep, even those hold memories), and way up high in the top of my closet.....my wedding dress.

Pictures like this one leave me wondering when our babies stopped being babies.

What can suck you in quicker than a box full of old letters? Even the box takes me back. I made it in my college woodshop class....the semester that Jeff and I started seeing each other. It's a treasure as well as all of the old letters inside!

The greatest thing I found was a record player and my records/albums. Most of them were kid albums and 45's that I once bought at a garage sale, but then there were the 45's from my childhood. It's the most amazing thing to me how tightly sounds from your past can take you back...much like smells. I sat and listened to those little 45's and I was a child again...making up little dances with my sisters or learning about first love in my teens. I sat that needle down on those records and waited through the first scratchy sounds in that little gap before the song starts...then it was as if the record player had never gone away.

The kids LOVED playing with that old thing. The songs were old and outdated, but somehow made new again by the novelty of the turntable and needle. What a find!

I have a long way to go before finishing the "clean sweep". I'm quite proud of myself for the things that I've managed to let go of. However, once everything is cleaned out and we step back to marvel at a job well done, there will be spaces reserved for those special treasures, and they will still be there on our next trip down memory lane!