30 • The Beacon April 18 , 2024

The day of reckoning has come , and now I ’ m paying for the sins of my past . Relax . It ’ s not as juicy as it sounds . I ’ m on a new cleaning jag at home , and of course , it ’ s of my own making . It all started with a good idea .

Years ago my husband Joe bought me a wonderful writing desk . But over the years , I ’ ve added tasks that need to be done to this desk . When internet bill pay became a thing , I moved the bills from my small desk upstairs to my writing desk because there was a computer there . Now we are getting older , and one of the worst things to come with old age is more paper .

Every organization involved with serving people in their old age is sending it to you monthly . I probably could get some of these informational papers online only , but that creates another set of problems aside from the fact I ’ d probably not even look at them at all .

I tried integrating all this new old-age paperwork with the other tasks on my nice , big writing desk , and it ’ s a mess — about two years ’ worth of a mess , piled up in one huge unfiled stack of papers . It tends to get mixed up with other stuff I ’ m working on .

Light bulb moment : I should turn the small desk upstairs into the old-age paperwork desk — that way I could get all these papers into one spot , and I have a filing cabinet upstairs too .

But now I had to clean up the small desk , which had become a catchall . And when I went upstairs to scope this out , it was apparent the entire spare room had become a catchall . I had a bad habit of pitching everything into this extra room , especially if I needed to clean up the house quickly .

There was much to do . I had to get heartless with stuff I thought I would save forever .

When I first started writing , the editor would pick up my printed copy each week from my front porch . In the meantime I had started to save clippings of all the stories I had written .

Now I looked around the spare room . There were six large and extra-large notebooks of clippings filed in protective plastic sheets , a bunch in folders , and a bunch to clean out of smaller notebooks . I quit saving clippings years ago , so this stuff had to go . Fortunately , the historical society took it . There is a lot of good information there on community events and interesting people . It would have been hard to just trash it .

I did trash a lot of things though . I had a couple of old notebooks from an organization I was very dedicated to and helped get off the ground . Gone .

My old notes from when I got to interview my humor column idol Dave Barry . Gone . I saved the autographed copies of his books , of course .

My Richard Sterban of the Oak Ridge Boys interview notes and humorist Garrison Keillor notes . Gone and gone .

Writing is sacred , but I trashed some old writing

I had done . It was mostly just starts of stories and columns that were no longer relevant — and lots of miscellaneous writing and record-keeping paperwork . I went through my address card file and tossed about a hundred cards . Many of these former contacts had retired or changed jobs since I made these entries , and unfortunately , many were deceased . I could probably get rid of the physical address card file altogether . The internet and social media make it so much easier to find and contact people .

I would say I ’ m about 75 % finished with this big cleanout , and I still have to organize the old people paperwork . But it ’ s all going to work out , and it ’ s good to be on a cleaning streak in the spring .

I ’ ve vowed to no longer commit sins against my

home . And next up , for my penance , those pesky junk drawers .

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jsellers @ alonovus . com

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