I remember when this picture was taken. My senior portrait was taken in the summer of 1970. I had had my first date about six weeks before. My boyfriend (later, my first husband) bought me that pearl ring for my birthday. Pearl is my birthstone. I was fresh, young, athletic. I didn’t know anything about anything, but I had the world by the tail!

I spent yesterday afternoon going through an upstairs closet that hadn’t been touched yet. I found a box of papers and sat for an hour or so shredding what I didn’t need. I gathered a bag of clothes for donation. I took what very few pieces of clothing that I wanted to keep and put them in the bedroom closet. I found a box of photo albums that I brought back from mom’s after she died. That was ten years ago. I’ve paid to have them moved three times! They were in those awful, sticky albums they can out with in the ’70s. It took me four hours to convert a large box of albums into a small stack of pictures that easily fit in three one-gallon ziplock baggies. Two for me and one to take to WV this summer. I also took my brother’s stack and put them into the best album I had emptied. Progress!

I finished up at 7:30 and headed back out to the lake to spend the night. Every day spent purging, cleaning, clearing the clutter from my life makes me feel 10 pounds lighter. Sort of fresh, young, athletic…like this girl in the picture.