Hello and welcome back my Blogville friends. I have selected a Berry Berry Blast ‘Relaxing Tea’ for our visit today. Probably due to the onset of spring cleaning, my thoughts have turned to our possessions, and how we love to hang on to them. While I write this blog I am enjoying my tea, procrastinating on my spring cleaning, and having a little fun on the topic. I thought I might share some of my experiences with you from what I call ‘The NO PARTING ZONE’ (cue the 1959 Twilight Zone theme music here).

I have always wondered if it is because I was adopted that I have such a hard time throwing things out. Then I met my husband. He was not adopted but he has an even harder time throwing things out than I do. He jokingly says that is why we are still
married after 44 years. Hmmmm . . .

Do you have that drawer too? The one where you have 100 or so twist ties and at least as many elastic bands? I mean, you never know when you might need them right? Oh, and do you remember bread tags with the “best before” date on them? Why would we keep those, and if you reused them, how did you know the true expiration date? I mean seriously, throw out the bread tags and use some of your 100 twist ties!

I have to say that keeping all the greeting cards I have ever received can actually be an advantage. Say, for example that one of my kids forgets to send or give me a card for Mother’s Day one year. While other mothers might have to resort to sending their kids a little guilt message, we who live in the NO PARTING ZONE do not.  Instead, I can simply select a card from my Mother’s Day Card collection, being careful to select one that was signed by that very same child, and put it on display for friends and family who may happen by. I call that ‘emotional recycling’, especially if I had to read through all the cards in my collection to choose the correct, but not most recent, one. Friends or relatives that happen to drop by might notice the absence of a card, but they likely won’t notice that the card on display was actually ‘recycled’.

Recently I was looking for something in my underwear drawer and an old film canister fell open, spilling its treasured contents. I won’t say what these tiny little white things were but my kids got money for them. Also inside the canister was a tiny piece of paper identifying the matching child (I do have four kids after all). Why do I still have these?? I once asked one of the kids if they wanted them and they looked at me like I had lost my mind. Hmmm, now that I’m thinking of it, I’ll have to ask her if she still has her kids’ little ‘pearls’ saved somewhere.

Another fun thing I come across occasionally (more often than I probably should) are those little works of art that were once found crumpled in the bottom of my children’s back packs. Remember, my kids are now in their 30s and 40s. Years ago those works of art were carefully flattened out to the best of my ability and proudly tacked up on the fridge or the bulletin board. I mean, how do you now throw those out? What if one of them asks me about that cow picture they drew in Grade 2? (Hmmm I always thought it was a moose!) What do I say. “I threw it out.”???

Once our children aged out of post-secondary education we set them free to find and create new lives out in the adult world. Apparently though, we are keeping their toys, textbooks, DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes, and so on in case they come back for them. In the NO PARTING ZONE every souvenir t-shirt, hoodie, and hat or cap, whether it fits them or not, should be kept. After all, if those souvenir items are given away or discarded, how will our children be expected to remember that family vacation? For them, and for us, those ‘touristy’ items hold their family vacation memories like a time capsule. After all, we likely never spent the money developing their camera films from the trip because it would have been too expensive to develop photos of their thumbs, feet, or bottom of their backpack.

On the topic of pictures, keeping all their school photos stacked year to year behind each other in special individual school photo frames has special significance. It means that our children are perpetually immortalized in those frames exactly as they looked in grade 12, the last picture placed lovingly in their respective frame. If my grandchildren are interested, they will be able to see their parents photos from Junior Kindergarten to the last grade of high school pressed tightly together one single picture frame. My grandchildren can literally watch the years of fashion, the progression from baby to adult teeth (sometimes including braces), no glasses to fashionably framed glasses, and the remarkable hairstyles, of their parents. Of course there are post-secondary framed pictures as well, but they were too big to fit in those old frames. 

Maybe with all the recycling programs and things like electronic picture frames where you can simply upload digital pictures, people will no longer need a NO PARTING ZONE. I remember years ago, before I had even really heard about recycling, we visited my husband’s brother in his very progressively green community in Southern Ontario. My brother-in-law showed us a divided waste disposal system in his kitchen and gave us a quick tour of the plastics, paper, and glass sections of this divided can in which to place our recyclables. Then, adding even more confusion, he showed us a compost container for food waste. To this day I wonder if my brother-in-law and his wife ever suspected why my husband and I carried multiple plastic bags TO the local mall. Did they ever wonder why there was no extra recycling despite having two house guests? Luckily, once their children were old enough, we could ask the boys which waste item went where, as if we were testing their knowledge, not ours. Also when visiting in future, we started bringing an extra suitcase for the ‘un-sortable’ garbage that we could never figure out what went where. Then, we simply brought that stuff home and threw it out. 

By the way, you know the multiple sets of car tires that are piled up in the garage from all the vehicles you have purchased during your marriage, no worries, in the NO PARTING ZONE you can use them in your yard as planters, sandboxes, or maybe even hang a tire swing somewhere on your property. Of note, old vehicle tires also make a wonderful senior citizen’s obstacle course right there in the garage or in your back porch, or both. Oh, and if you are really lucky, once your children move out and purchase their own vehicles and new tires, you get to store their off season tires for them too!

I feel a little bad for what my kids will face once we are gone. If things don’t get spring cleaned out of here before we die, they will have three generations worth of stuff to go through and decide its fate. There are things from my husband’s parents that he kept when they passed, and things I have kept from my parents. Then there are the things we kept from our four children and now from our grandchildren. There are probably 20 or more photo albums (those are big books we used to put printed pictures in, instead of storing them on on our phones) that they will need to go through and figure out what to do with. We all place different value on different things so what we have kept may be easy for them to get rid of and they may keep things we think they will throw away when we are no longer here. Either way, I don’t envy them the task.

I do have to make a pro-NO PARTING ZONE note here as well. As you may or may not know, in a previous blog I talked about meeting one my foster parents when I was in my 60s. It was a quest I had been on for over 40 years and when I met her, she gave me photographs of the youngest me I had ever seen. She had saved them in the hopes we would find each other again one day. I love her for that gift. In a cedar chest belonging to my parents was the tiny little outfit I wore when my adoption worker dropped me off to my parents in June of 1959. My mom had kept that outfit and all the ‘Congratulations You Are Adopting’ greeting cards my parents received from family and friends when I joined the family. I love my mom for that. 

Again, I am not sure if my adoptee status has influenced my need to keep little treasures of the past in my NO PARTING ZONE but all I can say is, ‘sorry kids’ be sure to think fondly of me when you go through these things. Maybe you can finally throw out your ‘works of art’. I know I cannot.
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Thanks for reading this little fun blog, I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any comments, and I LOVE your comments, please share them with me as it gives me the motivation to go on writing these little blogs. If you prefer to comment privately, please email me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you. 

Hello Blogville friends! Welcome back, it is so nice to see you. This morning I am drinking a green passionfruit tea that I have never tried before and it is very refreshing. Almost as refreshing as visit that I just had with a dear friend. Let’s talk about that for a bit.


So, just to illustrate the circumstances of this visit I have to bring you in to the start of it. My friend and I had been planning this visit for a while now, finally landing on the best dates that worked for both of us. Also, my friend usually stops and spends the night with another friend she has in a town just about half-way between my friend’s city and mine. This also serves as a break in the long journey’s drive as we are no longer ‘spring chickens’. At first I was worried about her driving during the eclipse day but realized she would be safely ensconced in her friend’s home by the time of the big event. 


So, one morning last week I had decided to take a walk on a different route than I usually do because the weather was spectacular for April in Northern Ontario. As I’m plodding along, listening to my tunes and enjoying the sunshine I get a text message from said friend. The text read, “Just leaving North Bay. Long hauling it.” I read, then re-read the text message, then checked the date (nope it isn’t April 8th, otherwise known as ‘eclipse day’) and so I text clarified, “On your way here?” My heart fluttering as I stood on the sidewalk watching the replying text bubbles. The bubbles disappeared as her one word message popped up, “Yes”


It is amazing how just one word can strike such panic in a person. I’m standing on some sidewalk on an unfamiliar block because today, TODAY, I decided to be adventurous! I have no idea how long it will take me to walk this route home but I do have an idea of what I need to do when I get there. I need to put fresh sheets on the bed in the guest room, clean the guest bathroom, and finish the dusting I had started last week , abruptly stopping when my family suddenly arrived early for dinner and I had never got back to finishing. 


Oh, wait! I’ll call one of my daughters for a ride I thought, phew! So I text her, she who is usually around, she who is not working today, she who is available. Yep you guessed it . . . not available to come and get her mother. All the times I dropped everything to go get that kid, you think she would be more grateful and drop everything to return the favour. “Ok, ok”, I started calming down as I remembered that North Bay is still a four hour drive from here. 


If only I knew how long it would take me to find my way out of this maze of a subdivision and get home. Surely it won’t take four hours. I pick up the pace. About half way home there is a road closed sign as the city workers repair yet another mine-shaft sized pot hole. Going around would take me an extra block of distance and time. Wait, the sign does not say ‘sidewalk closed’, and suddenly I see a fellow with a cane coming toward me on said sidewalk. Off I sprint before any workers can tell me not to use the sidewalk, and by ‘sprint’ I mean walk really fast. Made it!


So I enter my house, assess the cleaning priorities, and get moving. Well, moving as fast as a person can after walking twice as far as usual. I managed to get the bulk of the tasks done just before my friend drove into the driveway. “Is it the 8th already?” I asked. Laughingly she said her plans had changed. I would have been completely mortified if she were anyone else but as she is one of the most non-judgemental people I know, (and she was a week early after all) I was only a tad mortified. Phew!


Finally, her car is unpacked, suitcases safely in her room, the tour of towels, closet space and hangers, extra soap and such is over, so we go into the living room to relax and catch up. Suddenly, as we are sitting there talking, my attention is caught by a dust bunny behind the chair she was sitting in and a fine line of dust (that I had obviously missed in my surface cleaning frenzy) on the side of the organ just about a foot from her head.Mortification loomed again so that’s when I opened the wine.


I don’t know about you but visiting with a friend you knew ‘way back when’ but whom you do not see often is like being in a time machine. I met my friend when I went to live with my grandmother for a ‘victory lap’ of grade 12. I was temporarily living in a new community and going to a new high school in grade 12. Grade 12 is a year where friendships are long established and relationships are often at the ‘future planning’ stage. I just wanted to get in, get my three lost credits, and get out. Then I met my friend and her boyfriend. Spending those few days with my ‘way back when friend’ brought me right back to our teenage angst, to our being groupies for her boyfriend’s band, and to the fond memories of just having fun. We talked about students we knew then and where they are today.  We updated each other on our adult children and our grandchildren of course but we mostly enjoyed walking down memory lane. 


I don’t have a great memory but my friend seems to have an almost eidetic one, so she was able to refresh my recall of the many experiences we shared during my ‘victory lap’. We also talked about living with our grandmothers, I temporarily and she, permanently. I guess I had never really thought about it before but realized that she had been raised in a kinship scenario, abandoned by her birth parents just like I had been. That’s when we knew we also have trauma in common. We talked about the impact this probably had on us when we were teenagers and how that rejection maybe explained some of our risk-taking behaviour. We both agreed that our feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem were probably products of that parental rejection. It was definitely an ‘ah hah’ moment for both of us. For the rest of her visit we would sometimes look at each other  during a story or memory and say, ‘See? That feeling of rejection was actually trauma.” Or, “OMG, now I can see why I was so insecure and never felt I was good enough.”


While she was here there was an extremely heavy snowfall. She had gone out to get something from her car but seemed to be taking a very long time so I looked out the window to check on her. There she was, a woman in her mid 60s, building a snowman. She was very focused on the task at hand. She had even used a scarf from her car to tie around its midsection. I brought her out a hat and some mitts, (but did not offer to help). As she progressed, and it became obvious that she wasn’t going to quit, I brought her out some grapes for eyes and a carrot for the nose. I took pictures out my window and a short video. I poured myself a cup of tea, stood in the window, and watched my friend’s inner child playing in the snow. It made me smile. 


The next day we went for a walk to enjoy the beauty of the post-storm snowfall. As we were passing a heavily snowed in driveway there was a man, probably in his eighties, making his way slowly down towards the half frozen pile of sand/snow blocking his driveway, left there by the city snowplow. Without even looking at each other my friend asked him to hand her his shovel simultaneously with my asking him if he had another shovel. He apologetically offered me a slightly broken shovel. My friend and I worked together to move enough snow for this elderly couple to get out of their driveway and off to their appointment. I know my friend was paying it forward with a nod to her grandmother being there for her. Without consulting one another we just stepped up to help, I believe that our kinship and adoption histories leave us with the innate need to give back whenever we can. 


Later that day, we chatted about her leaving time the next morning and she indicated she was in no rush, so she was thinking around 9 a.m. but she didn’t want breakfast as she was going to gas up, grab a Timmies, and be on her way. Yep, you guessed it. I heard her up and about around 6:30 the next morning so I hit the shower, dressed and headed downstairs where I found her suitcases all packed and resting at the top of the stairs. I looked her in in the eye and said, “Hmm it looks like your 9:00 am departure turned into your April 8th arrival!” She laughed and said she was awake early and so thought she may as well get ready and head out on her long drive. 


I helped her load up her car, and as we passed the melted snowman remnants on the ground, the grape ‘eyes’ the carrot ‘nose’ and various twig limbs and hands, we giggled at the memory of her out in the snow storm building it. We hugged and said our goodbyes as she got in her car. As I was walking back up the driveway I noticed a twig, so I picked it up and returned to her car. I gestured for her to open the window and when she did, I handed her the twig saying, “Here, in case you need a hand.” Then, both of us smiling, me with a tear in my eye, she drove out of our driveway and off onto another adventure. Until next time my friend . . .


Thank you so much for visiting with me (and my friend) today. I so enjoy your company and I hope you enjoy my stories. As always, feel free to comment here or send me an e-mail at [email protected]. See you next time.