clearing my space

I am cleaning things out in order to make room for another person’s stuff in the house. I admit to having packrat tendencies, although once in awhile I will clear out huge amounts of stuff.
It was easy enough to weed out a bunch of clothes for Goodwill, but then I started cracking open boxes in my closets and things got a lot more difficult.

I mean, there’s all this stuff that I don’t use and don’t display and maybe will never want to do anything with, but I can’t get rid of. You know how it is. Stuff. I can’t throw out my senior prom glasses, for example, not because I remember anything particularly wistful about them but because no one gets senior prom glasses anymore. They encourage drinking, you know. I think our senior class was the last one at my high school to be allowed prom glasses. I would be interested to do a survey to find out if the amount of drinking at the senior prom has decreased significantly since then, because now that there aren’t any prom glasses, no one is drinking, right?
I have a small trunk full of stuffed animals and puppets that I can’t possibly bear to let go, but there isn’t anywhere in my house to display them. I do rotate them so most of them get a turn out in the big wide world, and every year I convince myself to get rid of a few more. I have a stack to give to my sister, to ration out to my niece during the year as appropriate.
I found a big glass jar in one box, and I remember my mom bringing it to me when she cleaned out their attic a few years ago. I guess I was 10 years old or so when I bought it from a craft store and painted my name on it with those little dots for serifs, and little dot flowers, which was all the rage at the time. I don’t want it, but I hate to throw it away, and it seems silly to give Goodwill something with my name on it. Especially something that looks so very laaaaame.
I saved a bag of silver-plated silverware that my grandmother gave me a long time ago, and now I’ll have to buy silver polish and give it all a good cleaning. Nice enough stuff, but not anything I’d really use. Still, they originally came from my great-grandfather so I can’t exactly get rid of them.
My plates and bowls from college are all going to Goodwill. I’m surprised I hadn’t done that already. And I might even get rid of a couple of bookcases that don’t really fit in the house anymore. One is too short and too flimsy to hold many books, one is short and just plain ugly. It’s been living in the spare bedroom closet but now it needs a new home. I need more bookcases (rather desperately actually), but really tall ones made of actual wood or metal.
I could get rid of a bunch of the books but … no.
Old newspapers my grandmother gave me, my parents’ and grandparents’ Super 8 movies that I’m supposed to convert to video (except my parents took the video camera back), the miniature cedar chests that I had as a little girl, filled with all kinds of childhood junk, a bundle of rags that was once my baby blanket, a stack of memorabilia from JournalCon Austin, a box full of videotapes that are almost too old to play … why should I keep this stuff? What will I ever do with it? These things will sit in my closet in boxes and boxes. Every year, I’ll decide I want to clean out my house and sift through these boxes, shaking my head and smiling over the grade-school medals for Bible Contest, and the enormous junky earrings I wore in high school, and a Marks and Spencer bag of letters I received when I spent the summer in London in 1991, and so forth. Is it worth it, taking up all that space, to relive all those memories every year? Or rather … is it worth gaining a few square feet of space, to lose all of those memories?
(And I haven’t even tackled the boxes full of carefully filed papers yet. That’s a whole other nostalgia trip. Maybe I’ll save it for the spring.)