Today the guy is here tiling my bathroom wall and we got into an interesting conversation about our mothers and grandmothers. It all began because we were talking about my upcoming garage sale in a couple of days and I was telling him how my mom is putting some really hideous old clothes on this sale that nobody in their right minds would touch with a 10' pole. He just happened to be over at the garage when she was unloading them from her van and into the garage and was trying to explain how one particular item was supposed to "function" and couldn't help but laugh.
He mentioned that his mother is the type of person who throws EVERYTHING away. He'll go home and ask his mom what happened to such and such an item and her response will be "I shipped it to the Goodwill". My mom, on the other hand, is the queen of the packrats. She KEEPS everything because, after all, you just never know when you might need something later on. I will try to throw something away and she will stop me saying, "no keep that." When I ask her why or what she's going to use it for, she'll say, "Oh, I don't know right now, but it's going to be good for something later on." This, coming from the woman who took a stick, put a bleach bottle on the top of it and painted the pointed end red and called it "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer". We all called it a stick with a bleach bottle on its head. It definitely did NOT look like a reindeer, but at least she has imagination and "creativity". LOL A couple of weeks ago she found a piece of wire on the ground outside. Personally I would've thrown it away, especially since the garbage can was sitting right there. Mom, however, decided that I needed to keep this piece of rusted out wire because I might need to wire something on to somewhere later on. Therefore, she wrapped it around the bottom of my shepherd's hook so it wouldn't blow away [bless her heart].
I'm sure she wasn't born this way. My grandma is just as bad. When we went to the nursing home one day, Mom and my aunt Evelyn were thinning out Grandma's closet. Grandma was just positive that they were stealing. Of course I got shoved way into the back corner where I couldn't get out. Evelyn was putting some of her winter clothes away so she could replace them with some cooler ones and she was taking some of the ones with holes, etc. out so she could repair them. But Grandma was positive she was stealing them. Well, she took that suitcase with the clothes in it out of there and then she and Mom hightailed it out of there, leaving me in the corner. Grandma threatened to throw me and Evelyn in jail. I didn't even do anything but sit there and keep to myself, but she considered me an accessory!! LOL But besides clothes, she has a tendency to keep a lot of papers, etc. in her little table besides her bed.
I know that I have picked up on some of these bad habits. When I was cleaning out my spare room [or as my mother likes to call it "my store room"] for my upcoming garage sale, I was going through some boxes that I haven't looked through for several years. Some of these boxes are boxes that were packed up when I moved out of my apartments in St. Cloud and Sauk Rapids so I have no clue what was even in them anymore. Well, I started going through them and there were a couple of things that I didn't even remember ever having and there were some things that I wondered why the heck I ever kept instead of throwing in the trash right away. That would be my "have to keep everything" instinct that I inherited from my mother. Needless to say, I threw out a few garbage bags full of nothing but CRAP!!
It should be interesting to see how much of my other crap sells. I love garage sales, but I can guarantee you, if it doesn't sell, it's getting donated. I'm not keeping anything "just in case ..." =)
