Spring Cleaning

The last couple of weekends, we've been doing some serious spring cleaning around our house.  I used to be a hoarder (and my son apparently has inherited that trait from me BIG TIME), but I've gotten much better at going through piles of clutter and realizing that some of it really is meaningless and just taking up space.  Today, I went through several boxes in our crawlspace that had all kinds of goodies in them from my youth.  Here is some of what I found:

- All of my old swimming trophies and medals.


- Newspaper clippings from my childhood days as a swimmer and baseball player (I had a .432 average one of the years I played and won my team's golden glove award one year).

- Pages and pages of "progress sheets" from all of my swimming events over about 9 years from elementary school through high school.  I kept some of the ones from state championships and nationals.

- Swim meet heat sheets.  Dozens of them.  Found a whole lot of names from the past I had forgotten about but used to compete against frequently.

- Award certificates.  Among them:  4 time Georgia swimming all star, Augusta Swim League team record holder in 50 free and 100 fly, high school letter in swimming, highest academic honors as a freshman in high school, high school foreign language award, and best of all....Mrs. Wix 3rd grade Green Dot Reading Program completion.  GREEN DOT baby!!

- An AWESOME collection of sea shells.  My grandparents used to own a beach house in Clearwater FL, and my dad and brother and I used to spend hours combing the beach for shells.  The beach was covered with mainly broken bits of them, so we eventually got to the point where we only kept the really cool ones.  My mom has a bunch of them at her house in GA, and I've got a box of really cool ones here now and have no idea how to go about displaying them.

- I found a body fat analysis I had done at a national swimming camp when I was 16.  I weighed 138 lbs, and my BF% was 7.3%.  Needless to say, I've added substantially to both of those numbers.


- My age group swimming sweat shirt.  In Illinois, many teams gave out patches for various achievements that we would have sewn onto our sweatshirts.  The best swimmer usually had the most patches.  Becca might fit into this sweatshirt now.

I always love going through my old stuff and remembering the old times and the people I shared them with.  I'm friends with many of them on Facebook now, and some I'd forgotten about for at least 30 years.  And seeing all of the swim meet papers made me realize again how fortunate I was to have parents who didn't mind driving (sometimes hours) and spending entire weekends sitting on hard bleacher seats on a hot pool deck in air that smelled like chlorine.  (Or if they did mind, they never let on that they did).  It was fun to see the notes and splits my dad had written on the heat sheets. 

The stuff that was just taking up space has been removed from these stashes, and I've got a couple of very manageable bins now with many of my childhood memories waiting to be cracked open again during the next big cleaning or when my kids get curious about stuff I did when I was their age.  I can relax easier now knowing that my life is a little less cluttered than it was at the beginning of the day.