My Trash/My Treasure

I should have started Chapter 9 today, but I got caught up in the hundreds, yes, literally hundreds of boxes piled around my office (and in closets) with papers, magazines, books--you name it-- stuff I've never been able to dispose of. So all day I've worked and I have one garbage bag filled. That tells me I'm keeping more than I'm chucking. This is the way I write too: in layers. Because I'm tossing in layers I'll have to go back through it again and again and again to ever get rid of it. The magazines are what really hurt me. I don't want to throw them away. I don't want to even GIVE them away. Look at what I've found so far:

Writer's Digest 2002-2007
The Writer 2002-2007
Writer's Journal
Christian Single
Pockets
Grit
Family Circle
Home Life
First
Baptist Message
Writer's Yearbook Magazine 2003
Romance Writer's Report - a subscription since 1981
Woman's World
Devo'zine
EC
Journey
Stand Firm
Single Parent Family
PC How-tos
Writer's Yearbook '99 :))
Southern Living
Alfred Hitchcock Magazine
Country Life
Mature Living
Poets and Writers 1999
Today's Christian Woman - 2000
Poets and Writers 1997 --
Family Handiman - Sept. 1992 Yikes! Must be from my woodworking phase. Yep, and my husband humored me. :)

Okay, I'll end it here but believe me when I say there are many, many more magazine titles. I'm sick! I know I have some kind of compulsive disorder. Next thing I know, I'll be saving gum wrappers. Wait! I've already done that. I can remember keeping a scrapbook with all kinds of weird stuff in it: Napkins from restaurants and movie tickets. Gum wrappers because some cute guy shared. A red and white peppermint for the same reason. I'd tape it to the page and write a little explanation beside it.

"Larry gave me this peppermint on November 12, 1962 standing in front of the biology lab."

Years later, when I came across that old scrapbook, there was nothing left of the peppermint except the paper it had been wrapped in. Evidently the ants feasted on my treasure. I wish they'd feast on all the magazines.

Dinah Shore said: There are no hopeless situations--only people who are hopeless about them.