Whew! Finally getting over the affliction I seem to suffer every year about this time: spring cleaning!

April ended up being largely devoted to scrounging through boxes and bags in my storage unit with the dual aims of clearing some things away and of chasing down receipts and documents for the other charming springtime task of filing taxes.

Yay.

Every year, this desperate scavenger hunt reminds me that my document retrieval system is not ideal:

And every year, I pledge to get organized. But as I excavate through decades-worth of stratified documentational layers with the best of intentions, I wind up straying off the pertinent path and following more pleasing paper trails – 

And I’m not sure I’d have it any other way.

As I’ve shared before, I do like to hold onto stuff (an inherited trait, I expect). My idea was for the storage unit to be temporary – but a 2010 date on the newspapers wrapped around dishes and such in there provides a depressingly accurate measure of the distance in my life between theory and practice…

Although, this spring I did manage to make a lot of progress in the organizing arena! Well, it was some progress. Okay, a tiny bit of progress. The thing is I also like to hold onto reasons for holding onto stuff. And in fairness, the IRS is one pretty good reason! One day, I might be required to produce support for stuff like expenses, donations, and health care costs (e.g., medications, co-payments, champagne – all absolute necessities to my wellness). And you know what? I’ll be ready!

With a little excavation.

Afraid it’s also fair to say that some receipts and papers I’ve diligently saved over the years wouldn’t ever be of interest to the Feds. I mean yeah, I didn’t try to take a deduction for last year’s ride on a historic old train:

I’m pretty sure the 2005 date for this tram ride up Alaska’s Mt. Ayeska puts the event outside of any auditing windows: 

And since my career in entertainment didn’t “take off” for four more decades, I don’t think I could count the play I caught at an Illinois theater in 1980 as a research expense:

So yes, these documents don’t really have a place in the all-important income tax duffel – but I can’t bring myself to transfer them to the circular file either. Because while they don’t work as deductions, they definitely help me itemize a lucky and lovely life of travel!

Like that tram receipt brings back memories of good times criss-crossing the continent to play recreation ice hockey! Before a 2005 tournament in Anchorage, we ladies of the LA Chill visited the town of Seward (“Mile 0” for the Iditarod National Historic Trail!) and then stopped at Alyeska Resort for our choice of snowmobiling, snowboarding or (in my less ambitious case) fine dining and panorama seeking!

And that theater bill comes from the summer before my senior year in high school when the folks and I drove all the way to Maine and back, taking in historic sights and scoping out universities I might want to attend. Never able to resist a night of theater, we also hit an outdoor production of “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight”, and that brochure helps me recall a charming evening of poetry rendered to the chitter-chattering cadence of local bugs! Oh – I ended up going to college pretty much in my backyard, but that was still time very well spent!

So many cherished trains of thought to hop on with just a few tickets…

I factor in too that my memory can require some prompting these days to arrive at its destination. On a recent storage unit errand, I punched in my now-familiar personal code at the front gate, and then in the elevator – but at the exit gate minutes later, it eluded me. Thankfully, there was an 800 number to call for assistance! Of course, what did they want for identity verification? My personal code…

So I figure these brochures and receipts serve as needed exercise for my brain! And I hedge my memory bet in other ways. Photos are helpful – even more-so in this digital era where a pic includes a date stamp! If my recollection gets cloudy, I can fall back on the Cloud!

It’s fun to start the day not just by savoring my morning coffee, but also by choosing a mug that summons the memory of season after season of enchanting theater shared with Mum and Dad at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival!

And I can literally wrap myself in joyful memories of those hockey playing days with a quilt crafted from tournament t-shirts!

With apartment space admittedly tight though, it’s been suggested to me that a way to declutter would be to save photos of objects rather than save the objects themselves – leaving room in kitchen cabinets for food, and costing me far less than that storage unit. I’ve also been steered in the direction of Marie Kondo and her popular strategies for tidying. All sound advice there, I’m sure. 

I do get that maybe I’m too attached to the tangible. I mean, I’ll still take an actual book over an audio one. I enjoy perusing my shelf of Blu-rays. And I do get a particular rush out of being able actually to hold things that connect me to people and to days gone by – especially when one goes all the way back to when my journey through life began:

These cards held onto by the folks could be proof that my pack-rattish tendencies are genetic rather than a choice! (Maybe I’m just rationalizing, but hey – tow-may-tow, tow-mah-tow.) I love to imagine Dad’s holding up one of these to the hospital nursery glass so his eye could be directed to the proper wiggly infant. I also can’t help wondering if there isn’t a second card because my brilliant but absent-minded-professor dad might have temporarily lost track of the first!

I was reading about this Canadian teenager who has “highly superior autobiographical memory” (HSAM) – one of those rare brains that allows people perfectly to recall every date and event of their lives. I’m really jealous. Because, increasingly, my brain and my work-in-progress storage space have much in common: some items in each are readily available while others require searching to recover; some objects don’t do much to induce a memory (for now, anyway); and then there are empty spaces where things used to be and just aren’t anymore…

The study of people like that Canadian teen might result in breakthroughs for maintaining the health and agility of all of our brains. But in case that takes a while to sort out, I’m gonna hold onto my archive – to the papers, the pics, the mugs, the quilt, and to my folks’ stuff too! (Although to paraphrase Roy Scheider, I’m gonna need a bigger duffel…) Because coming across each item now and again preserves in my mind – and my heart – the memory of some grand experiences and, most importantly, the grand people with whom I shared them!

Being blessed with so much joy-sparking stuff? Well that’s a fortunate, fortunate tidiness challenge to have!

Cheers!