Update on today

A snow day from work seems to be the best day for Kondo-ing. Today I made a huge dent in my desk filing. Of the items that fall under recent financial/health and other important stuff for me and my parents, I only have a few more files to go.

During the years when my mom was sick (and even before and after, to be truthful) I was not great about filing anything, even important papers related to her illness or our finances. I basically threw them in piles and bags and through some miracle was able to find things when I needed them.  Over the summer I rehabbed a huge file cabinet that had been my husband's, and started filing these items in there, a bit at a time.

Part of this process is I just get so overwhelmed by everything I'm working with. If it's not memories that are getting to me, it's the general feeling of intimidation that financial and health papers engender in me.

In the future, as far as financial/health docs go, I will attempt to file everything that needs filing immediately, and only have very "hot"/in progress papers out in the open. This is a Marie Kondo thing but also a very organized person thing. It's the way my husband operates and I am finally seeing the wisdom of it.

Here's a picture of my desk now…surrounding it is the next challenge...the "non-important" ephemera (that is actually very important to me): everything from every letter everyone ever wrote me, to all my papers from college, to my mom's collection of royal wedding clippings, to the closing documents from my parents buying their house in 1975...

 In a few months I hope there is NOTHING under this desk. Two things that I want to spend time doing in this area are things that mean a lot to me…writing songs and painting/drawing/crafting…and I need the creative and emotional space to do that.

During a break I hung out with my husband downstairs, and worked on another ongoing project…pulling photos out of a disintegrating album and putting them in a box. I only got through a few pages; it's going to take a while (as is the huge photo project that this is only a small part of). It's painstaking because I have to transfer my mother's notes to the back of them…if I don't I won't remember what the photos are! Anyway here's my mom and grandfather, who is inexplicably playing a ukulele.