why

I realize that as a person, I tend to have very nostalgic tendencies, not wanting to readily throw certain things away. Also having a tendency to feel claustrophobic around too much clutter, I have made a concerted effort to downsize over the past few years, excising a whole lot of essentially worthless crap that I should have gotten rid of years ago so that I won't have to tote it around forever and eventually be buried with it. It's a work in progress, this process, but I feel like I have gotten pretty good at separating the wheat from the chaff.

Every once in awhile though, apparently, I miss something. Maybe I've just looked at it so many times, I don't even realize it's there any more. And it takes my toddler to point out, "Pumpkin?" and show me that yes, indeed, I still have a Halloween pencil in our pencil cup that I must have gotten in 5th grade. Seriously. It's one of those pencils with the stackable leads, where when the lead gets dull, you just take the little piece out and push it into the top of the pencil to get the next lead? And I know I haven't seen those since the 80s. In my mind I picture all of my classmates who must have received the same pencil as a class party favor or whatever, eventually sorting through their pencil supplies as they grew up and throwing the Halloween pencil out. They were probably 12 when they did so. Me, I'm 29. And I still haven't thrown it out because by now I figure it won't be that long before my daughter could play with it.

Anyway, maybe I'm just a very diligent recycler.