I opened that box again. The one with all of the letters that Grandma L kept all those years. The one with envelope after envelope of pictures. The one (shudder) with the eleven diaries.
I am pomising myself, now, that I will repack the box into a smaller box before I go to bed. I will not leave this spread all over my desk and stacked on the floor around my chair.
On the up side, I filled a wastebasket with pictures that I won't be keeping. And I filled the recycling wastebasket with envelopes, clippings, a handful of letters (that I read to make sure there isn't anything in it that I'd want to keep), and a bunck of the smaller boxes that were inside the big box.
I feel pretty good about that. I still have a stack of photos to sort and scan. And I still don't have a working scanner. They can go into the nifty card-sorting boxes that I bought recently. The rest can go into a smaller box. That will fit on a shelf in my closet, rather than out in the garage. So I can keep picking at it.
So. A little guilt for spreading this stuff around again. A little pride that I've gotten better at culling photos. It doesn't hurt that Grandma L had a habit of multiple copies. A lot of the snapshots that got tossed tonight are copies of views I already have scanned, sorted, and indexed in the box file. That helped.
The diaries will be dealt with last. If I wanted to feel really virtuous, I'd take out the wastebaskets before I went to bed. We'll see.
