Memories and Old Stuff
Picture of Biberach. Photo: Ulla Hennig
Do you know this feeling? You have decided to declutter your home (it is spring, isn’t it) and you found a picture stuffed somewhere in the closet / drawer. It belongs to a certain period of your life which is over now. So you decide to throw it away. Before doing that you pick it up and have a look at it.
And then, suddenly, all the memories come back. And there are a lot of memories connected with that tiny little picture. You can’t throw your memories away, can you?
It happenend to me with the picture above. It is a drawing of my birthtown, Biberach, which is situated in the south of Germany, near Lake Constance. I lived there until the age of 5 and then our family moved to another town. It has got a historical marketplace, and every summer there is a big fair with historical parades, called the “Biberacher Schützenfest”.
Looking at that tiny picture all that came back in my mind. What could I do? No, I was sure that I didn’t want to hang it up on the wall. It had no place in my life as it is now. But what to do with my memories? I was just thinking of putting it back where it had been all the months when I got an idea: I would take my camera and take a picture of it. I would then upload this picture to my flickr account. There it would be – ready for looking at it whenever I wanted to do that.
As you can see, I put my idea into practice. My memories are safe now – and the old stuff can go away.
How do you deal with old stuff which has a lot of memories for you?
7 responses to “Memories and Old Stuff”
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Ulla Hennig's Weblog 
Hi Ulla, You’re on to something here. We have a very cluttered home because we have so much trouble throwing things away. Maybe this is an answer. You’ve got a very nice picture, though. Have you thought about selling it or donating it?
Brad,
actually the picture looks much nicer on the photo than in reality. So it is not a picture to sell or to donate. The reason I kept it was that it held so many memories – which are now connected with the photo.
We started photo-archiving a lot of our memories a few years ago and donating (or trashing in some cases) all of our “stuff”. It has definitely help us declutter.
Luke,
thanks for dropping by! Yes, I think I will continue with photo-archiving. It really helps to declutter.
Ulla, I love the picture and love it more for the good memories it holds for you. That was a brilliant solution. I try to cleanse frequently so that I am always making room for new stuff but have also been guilty of looking at things, reliving the memories and then hanging on to it! For those things I wait until I am in a letting go mood, unemotional and then get rid of it.
What a wonderful idea to take a picture of your endearing jetsam and flotsam before throwing it away. Fortunately we have a rather large, dry basement to store endearing artifacts.
OH! I lived in Konstanz for 3 months! It was absolutely beautiful. I spent a lot of time in Meersburg just wandering the streets as well.