De-cluttering

Ok, so my goal when I woke up this morning was not to de-clutter my life. Really, I promise.

That’s mostly because I hate to clean.

But last night, something made me sad.

See this?

e=”DSC_3945″ src=”http://barefootmel.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/DSC_3945-300×200.jpg” alt=”” width=”300″ height=”200″ />

Tobin and I bought this little travel cribbage board at a tiny beach shop in Santa Barbara, CA, on our first anniversary trip. We both liked to play and only had a bigger board that really shouldn’t be hauled everywhere we went.

We paid around $4 for it, put our initials on the back of it, and had

Absolutely. No. Idea.

the history that this tiny, $4 board would make.

We took it all over the world with us.

That cribbage board has been in more Starbucks than you have, probably. It’s been on the sand of Camps Bay Beach in Cape Town, South Africa. We always took it with us to a little, tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Jl.

Cimbeleuit close to our first house in Indo where we’d go for noodles, strawberry juice, and fried ice cream. We played it in a little cafe in Amsterdam that served probably the best pastry I’ve ever had in my life. It’s been in countless airports (oh, wait I counted them!) as we passed hours upon hours of waiting for flights. It’s been the cause of a few arguments when one of us whomped the other in a skunked game.

It’s even made its rounds during the last year here in Illinois…during those first lonely weekends when we just had each other, we’d go find a Starbucks or Caribou and play cribbage while Mae napped.

It’s special. It’s a piece of us…and last night, we realized it was gone.

And while it’s just a thing, losing it hurt.

More than we admitted to each other.

Our first reaction was…it’s almost like this is, strangely, the way it should be. After being a “friend” as we traveled the globe, it figures that we’d lose it the week after we bought a house!

Our only inkling of where it might be was possibly in one of my purses.

Which is really not helpful if you know how often I switch the bag I’m carrying. But after looking everywhere ELSE, I knew what I needed to do.

Clean out the purse closet.

Glory be…you really have no idea the task that I undertook when I started this today.

I will not show you any pictures.

I will not tell you how many purses I cleaned out.

I will not even tell you about the things I found in some of them because…and I was joking about this with a friend through texting tonight…I think I might need therapy after the rawness of my emotions at seeing some of the things that had found their way into the hidden nooks in those bags.

Some of those things had me in tears, especially the goodbye notes I found from friends when I left Indonesia. (Definitely worth finding…but, nothing like a good cry.)

I cleaned purse after

purse, bag after bag.

I made three piles

: the I-don’t-care pile; the I-care-enough-to-give-away-to-someone-I-love pile, and the either I-use-and-or-like-this-bag  or I’m-not-ready-to-sever-the-emotional-ties-with-this-bag pile. The last pile is the one that is still hanging in the newly cleaned purse closet.

And you’ll be happy to know that the first two piles make up at least half of my former bag/purse collection.

Friends, we are making progress.

So, if you need a bag/purse and have an idea what you want, chances are I probably have it and am willing to give it to you. Seriously.

And part of me knows that I’m really not done sorting through all of my purses. I just can’t get rid of them all at once…but it is a start.

And I’ll take it.

Oh, and I almost forgot.

I found the cribbage board. In the

Very. Last. Purse.

😀