My parents were married for more than 65 years, and lived in the house that just sold (and is closing at the end of this month) for 42 years. During that time, they also helped clear a couple of other people's houses (and accumulated some stuff from those places) -- most notably the house my mom grew up in, which was built by her grandparents/my great-grandparents after their marriage in 1904, and bulldozed in early 1998. (My grandparents had moved in the early 1980s, to an apartment and later to the care home in town, but there was still a lot of stuff left in the house until just a few years before it was torn down.).
Neither my mom, nor my grandmother, were very good about throwing things away (to put it mildly...). In a nutshell, there was (and still is) a LOT of STUFF to go through! My sister & I started going through closets while I was still there in December/January, and she has continued the work over the past few months (mostly on weekends, because she's still working and lives about an hour away). By the time I got there a few weeks ago, the pile of boxes in the closet assigned to me to go through had grown quite a bit since my sister sent me the photo I used in this post) -- and of course there were still other closets and cupboards to empty too.
Some of the stuff was mine. (I'm a bit of a packrat too -- although moving to and living in a condo has forced me to do better...! And suffice to say, I would not want to leave a similar amount of stuff behind for the nephews to go through, after I've gone...!) My sister & I have done two or three weed-outs of our stuff at Mom & Dad's in the past, but there was still a LOT there that needed to be sorted through and disposed of. Somewhat miraculously, I managed to pare down what was there enough to fit into one box (after filling a suitcase to take home with me -- also miraculously, it did NOT exceed the airline's weight limit!!). My sister and her partner have agreed to keep the box for me for one year. I figure I'll be heading back in July and likely again at Christmastime, and should be able to bring what's left home with me over the next two or three visits.
It was physically tiring work, but emotionally exhausting too. (Kleenex was required.) All these things, saved and treasured by my mom & grandmother (and great-grandmother) for all these years... and now it was up to my sister & me (both childless -- the buck stopped with us) to decide what the heck to do with it all.
We sorted things into several different piles:
- keep (for Dad's apartment, my sister or me, or possibly PND),
- ask our cousins if they want it (not likely, as they just finished emptying out THEIR parents' & other grandparents' houses!),
- recycle,
- take to the local thrift store,
- take to the local library (books),
- possibly sell? (PND's dad sells vintage stuff through his eBay store -- he got some jaw-dropping prices for our old Barbie dolls and their clothes!).
- I also set aside a few things I thought should be offered to the museum in the Minnesotan county where my mom's family is from. (Not sure how or when we can get things to them, since neither my sister nor I are anxious to cross the border anytime soon...)
- Sadly, many of the things we found had to be tossed -- but I did take a lot of photos of some of the more interesting or memorable items.
Among the things we found:
- Tchotchkes upon tchotchkes... decorations for all seasons! (My sister is keeping some of the Christmas decorations for now, since Dad has expressed an interest in having a small tree in his apartment.)
- At least four or five (mostly) complete sets of dishes, some of which my dad & sister took. The rest went to the thrift store.
- Drinking glasses (some of them chipped and cracked -- we gleefully tossed those -- we'd been trying to get our mom to throw them out for years!!). And lots of coffee mugs. We took the ones that get used the most over to Dad's apartment.
- We found an entire set of vintage early 1960s highball glasses that I dimly remember from my childhood, wrapped in newspaper and packed away in a box in the garage. I don't think it had been opened since Mom & Dad moved in, 42 years ago. When we realized what was in the box, we closed it up again and set it aside to go straight to the local thrift store.
- An entire box (plus an entire drawer) filled with vintage recipe books that belonged to both our Mom and Grandma, as well as their boxes of recipe cards and piles of recipes written on random pieces of paper. My sister set most of these aside to go through later.
- (There was also a stack of recipes in our great-grandmother's handwriting -- most of them in pencil and barely readable. Sadly, most of these got tossed.)
- More empty plastic margarine tubs and casserole dishes than anyone will ever have use for.
- Piles of towels and sheets, worn threadbare -- as well as some that were like new and barely or never used??
- What seemed to be every single greeting card my grandmother ever received, dating back to at least the 1940s. (Grandma, I love you, but seriously??)
- Umpteen vintage postcards, some of them signed (some by family members), but many of them blank. (These may ultimately get tossed, but my sister is going to look into whether they're worth anything.)
- Boxes & boxes and piles & piles of old photos (both our family's and Grandma's), dating back to the late 1800s. Some identified or identifiable, but many sadly not. (My sister is going to arrange to have them scanned, or as many as possible, but says she can't keep all the originals, which makes me cringe.)
- Tax receipts and receipts from local businesses in my mom's/grandmother's hometown, dating back to the early 1900s, including some for my great-great grandmother's house. (Those got tossed.)
- My grandmother's report cards from school. (She wasn't a particularly good student!)
- All of MY report cards from school! (I took these home with me.)
- Letters and paperwork related to my medical history as a child, including a couple of vaccination records. (Ditto above.)
- A box containing my childhood/teenaged/young adult diaries & journals and assorted other writing. This was a huge relief, as I'd been looking for these on previous visits home and they were not where I thought they should be. There were a lot more notebooks than I'd remembered, and they made a HEAVY pile! I took some of the earliest (and likely funniest) ones home with me and will bring the rest on future visits.
- I didn't have time to go through them, but I did glance into a couple (and shook my head -- "He's not worth all the angst, teenage Loribeth!").
- I may toss some or all of them eventually, but I would like the chance to look through them more closely first, and I didn't have time to do that then.
- I did immediately toss one notebook filled with really bad, cringeworthy teenage poetry. Yikes!! lol
- I'd tossed most of my school notebooks, etc., during previous clearouts -- but I'd still kept several scrapbooks, projects, etc., plus programs from high school band concerts, drama productions, etc. and many of the essays I'd written. I think I kept every university essay too. I tossed almost all of them, but took photos of some of the grades and teacher/prof comments.
- I had to chuckle/shake my head when I looked at the titles/topics of some of the papers (which sounded strangely familiar/current...!): Quebec separatism, western Canadian alienation, the rise of the Moral Majority and evangelical churches' influence in U.S. politics, Trudeau's record as prime minister (Pierre, obviously -- Justin was a child at the time!)... Plus ca change...!
- On a Grade 12 essay on Shakespeare's Hamlet, my teacher dryly observed, "So much story here to get to the point you wish to make." I took a photo of that comment -- touchez, Mr. P! (Dh will tell you things haven't improved over the past 45+ years...! lol and ouch!)
- A stack of vintage 1970s Osmonds bubble gum cards.
- A stack of all the 1970s-era 45s my sister & I owned (separately & jointly, pooling our allowances).
- LPs: I already had most of mine (and gave them to Older Nephew when we moved into our condo), but there were still plenty owned by my sister, ones we owned jointly (lots of Archies, Partridge Family, Osmonds, Bay City Rollers, K-Tel compilations), Christmas albums (many of them gifts from our grandparents), and ones that were my mom's.
- Beautiful church certificates from my great-grandparents' 1904 marriage, as well as similar baptism certificates for several of their children, including my grandmother.
- Guest books for both my grandparents' funerals, my great-uncle's funeral and my parents' 40th wedding anniversary party.
- Stacks of letters/notes that my grandparents wrote to each other in the years between when they started going out together (late 1920s) until their marriage in 1937. This floored me, because they lived in the SAME SMALL TOWN during almost all of that time!! Many of them didn't even seem to have been mailed (no envelopes, just names written on the back of carefully folder pages. I'm guessing they passed notes to each other in the hallways at school, or had them delivered by friends?
- Another (smaller) pile of letters.... from other girls to my grandfather (!!). Flirtatious ones too, from what I gathered at a glance. (No time to sit and read all this stuff, even if I wanted to!)
- This also floored me for two reasons: (1) My understanding was my grandparents only ever had eyes for each other... apparently not! (2) My grandmother actually KEPT these letters from her rivals in her house??!
- A vintage 1899 single-page "love letter" in beautiful handwriting, from my great-grandfather to my great-grandmother (!), apparently in the early days of their courtship. She was leaving on a trip west: he laments that their acquaintance to date has been too brief, and ends by asking her to "Please do not forget your [name]." Awww.....
- A pile of letters and V-mails from my great-uncle (my grandmother's younger brother) from when he served in Italy during World War II, as well as his induction notice, discharge papers and other related paperwork. He never married or had children... lived a quiet, unassuming life with my grandparents after he returned from the war, and worked on a local honey farm as a beekeeper, until his untimely death at age 58.
- Also: my grandfather's induction notice, and his medical board rejection notice (!).
- Also: a stack of my great-grandmother's wartime ration books (!) -- WITH coupons still inside them!!
- I insisted to my sister that these need to be donated to the county museum. I think I've convinced her. (I hope.) I took photos of one of the letters, but I wish I'd had time to read more of them.
- An entire box filled with letters my mom wrote to my dad (!) and her pre-dad boyfriend/fiance from nursing school (she was there one year before getting married), as well as a diary. Yes, I was curious! But -- my sister & I decided there are some things you probably shouldn't know about your parents (especially when one of them is still around), and agreed these needed to go, unread.
- My mother's 1960 wedding dress (short, pale blue) and several vintage 1950s prom/bridesmaid dresses. The wedding dress sadly had long-established mildew stains on it and had to go, but my sister is going to see if any vintage stores or charities that outfit girls for prom would be interested in the others.
- MY 1979 graduation dress. (I took a photo of it and put in the pile for the thrift store.)
- Several adorable children's dresses that my sister and I wore back in the 1960s.
- An adorable little red sweater with white trim and little buttons that look like owl faces, hand-knit for me when I was a toddler/pre-schooler by one of my mom's high school friends. We showed it to PND and she took it home to wash and see if it would fit Little Princess #3.
- A large box filled with smaller boxes, ALL containing Mom's jewelry (and some of Grandma's too, I think). The vast majority of it was cheap costume stuff. We didn't have time to go through it, but my sister said she will and she'll set aside anything she thinks I'd be interested in.
- And... a little wooden chest, that I'm going to post about separately.
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| It's not often that I manage to make my sister completely crack up with laughter, but this photo did the trick!! 🤣 It's from a Grade 1 (1966-67) scrapbook project, titled "Ways Plants Help Us." The page on the right is captioned "Beauty and shade" and apparently is illustrated with a vintage ad for bras and girdles! 🤣🤣🤣 |
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