Odds and ends from a purge
more words than you'd think about getting rid of things. and keeping things, including some fragments from blog posts of yore.
Apparently 2025 was the year of the purge for me. I'm not sure if I'm unsettled or encouraged by the feeling that 2026 has more yet to come in that vein, but it probably doesn't matter – the purge don't care about your feelings. Ha!
About this time last year, I went through my office and organized all the paperwork, created a mountain of shred paper, and made multiple trips to the ARC (local thrift store / donation spot). While it's true that part of what drove me then and what brings me back to this blog today was avoiding an in-progress manuscript, I also could feel something shifting and knew that it was a timely activity. Just weeks later it became clear that we were moving and I started visiting the ARC guys every few days, then daily, and on one exceptional day, so many times that they themselves considered it an unusual amount of traffic from one party! Not a means of being exceptional that I'd ever dreamed of, to be sure.
I stopped by so often that I became aware of their work schedule and would sometimes adjust my drop-off schedule to prioritize being able to greet my "favorite" guy who often brought his friendly little dog. I built up such a regular routine of daily visits that when I took a brief jaunt out of town, I worried that they might think I'd got sick or suddenly died. (Perhaps silly of me, but if you have regulars at your job, you notice when they come and when they don't. In my days at the public library we fretted terribly over the regular Sunday Morning Newspaper Lady's weeks-long absence only to find out – to our relief – she'd been on an epic trip.) I can imagine working at a donation center it's much more common to see a series of visits suddenly end than it was for us at a library.
My parents, ever helpful, visited and pitched in as we prepped the house to go on the market – and chalked up three box truck loads to our ARC buddies in just a few eventful hours. A series of colleagues came; little by little, the outdoor furniture disappeared. We hovered over our bar backstock like Santa's elves, carefully curating boxes which we delivered to friends all over town – Christmas in July!
Then, whoosh, the season of purging came to a close. I ran out of time. Everything that remained was packed up in a day and a half, loaded onto a semi and most of it was put directly into storage where it still sits.
When it all gets pulled back out of storage and emerges from the boxes in a messy effusion of blank newsprint and knots of frayed, dirty packing tape – what will I find? I'm not sure. My memories of what I kept and what I purged are a little fuzzy. Of the few things I've specifically missed while we perch in our temporary housing, most likely some are there waiting and others are gone forever. Will I remember why I kept what I kept, and why I purged what I purged? Hard to say.
While we are here in the waiting place, it's been more difficult than I expected not to go into a frenzy of purging. It would be a mistake to rush ahead, in the urge for action and decision, to act and decide based on a set of circumstances that we know are so very temporary. Better, if harder, to sit in the ambiguity and wait until the fog clears.
Anyway, back to how this got started: here are a few odds and ends I wanted to save from previous iterations of this blog, which long ago used to be called Odd Size Baggage.
Why did I keep these and purge others? Hard to say.
2013-02-16
Some shoes weren't made to walk in but to look at
2013-02-09
Possibly the first recorded use of "These are the days of our libraries"
2010-08-09
...[What if] instead i just went off to an apprenticeship with a cooper because that will always be useful even after the snowpocalpyse or twitpocalypse or whatever kind of pocalypse is next, not that i would know at that point, having embraced the Dignity of Labor in a profound way that would probably involve working long hours, going to bed early, and more than likely wearing some kind of highly functional apron.
maybe i should have just taken to writing nonsense a long time ago, because that wasn’t hard at all.
N.B. I have to believe this career switch musing was influenced by Daniel Day-Lewis and his jaunt as a cobbler in Italy.
2009-11-12
...this morning, my MacBook couldn’t find its brain. So instead appeared this cry for help.
Since I live alone, no one heard my audible cry for help.
2009-11-09
As it happens my desk is so buried in articles that I covered up my wallet with them and didn’t notice until I was an hour into the suburbs, ordering a beer. Cue sad trombone.
The good news is the wallet has been recovered from the office. I guess anyone who is so tired and not aware as to leave their wallet on their desk and not notice until two hours and 50 miles later probably didn’t need a beer anyway.
2009-11-07
I really love being out in the country. I also really love plumbing and warm beds and no bugs. I think that implies an emphasis on day trips.
2007-07-17
good luck! it's hard to be pure in this wild world. 🙂