Spring Cleaning

I learned a good housekeeping tip a few years back from my sister who has quite a knack for being organized. (She has been known to even organize her clutter. I once saw a sturdy plastic bin in her garage with a lovely label-maker generated label on it that read "random stuff") She advised me to do spring cleaning in the winter when it's too cold to go outside, and use the warm spring days to work on the yard. Which, as it turns out, is a good method for me because once the weather is warm I will be just itching to get outside.

So I'm spring cleaning in January and this year my focus is on reorganizing our home office.

Soon after moving into this house we got a "new" desk (I have to use the quotation marks because it was actually just an old freebie desk we found on KSL classifieds). This desk has two large file drawers in it. As we established our household and created new files, we put them in the file drawers of the desk and more or less ignored our large file cabinet--the file cabinet that we had used for years before moving here, the file cabinet that was in need of a serious clean out, the file cabinet that no one wanted to deal with. That old thing has been sitting in the corner of our office basically unused for almost four years. But now after several years of pretending it's not sitting in the corner taunting me to organize it, I'm finally dealing with it. The surprising thing is, it hasn't been that bad of a task.

While I admit that most of what I've come across just needs to be sorted, thrown out or shredded, I've found that digging through old files has actually been a roller coaster of emotions. Some things I have found have made me laugh, like a file of "important things to file" that never got filed and now its contents are no longer important. Some things made me very nostalgic, like an old check registry from the first year we were married that showed payments to the hotel for our honeymoon and date nights to our favorite restaurants in Provo that are no longer in business. And a few things I found made me a little mad, like an old statement for my 401k that shows the account had more money in it five years ago than it does today.

And there amid the old insurance claim forms and bank statements, I also found a bright red folder containing many love letters my husband and I have sent to each other through the years. There was a note I had written to him during our engagement to apologize after our first major misunderstanding. There were several little cards that had been attached to flower bouquets he has sent me, some of which I had received during some of the most difficult days of my short teaching career. There were lots of Valentine and birthday cards and a few "just because" cards.

Life is funny that way. Often as we struggle to sort through and deal with all the clutter that is necessary to keep our lives functioning, we get unexpected happy reminders of why life is so worth living in the first place.