The Pack Rat Queen

I think I just might be the Queen of the Pack-Rats, the Empress of Keeping Stuff, She Who is Ridiculously Sentimental.

My house is under contract and will close on September 8. I will be getting my clothes washer and dryer back after the tenants move out at the end of this month. My apartment has a closet that is intended to hold a washer and dryer, and I've got that space filled top to bottom (literally) with boxes of stuff. Many of these boxes contain papers that I have collected over the year...school work, letters, notes, "memories". And it is time for me to let go of a lot of this stuff. I just have no room, and really, not a lot of reason to keep holding on anymore.

I've been a sentimental clinger for many, many years. So today I decided to start with just one box. Just one box filled with stuff. This box contained:
• all my English papers from grades 9-12
• every piece of correspondence I received the summer of 1997 including printouts of emails, several dated pieces of paper indicating that I had a package waiting for me in the ASU Physics mailroom, my own dated grocery lists, boarding passes from the flights I took, cereal coupons, some of my own angsty poetry, pages and pages of data printouts from my summer physics research, about 10 different versions of rough drafts of my final paper
• my 1994 day planner
• a shoebox filled with birthday cards and letters from my 14th and 15th birthdays, notes from friends that must have been notes passed in hallways or during class probably from around that same time, a program from my high school's December 1992 band (did you know I'm a band groupie), more angsty poetry, a still-very fragrant "Eternity by Calvin Klein" sample, and some "Calvin & Hobbes" cut out from the newspaper.
• my first drivers license. wow, big hair in the early 1990s!
• I think maybe all correspondence I received the my first 2 years of college (people actually wrote letters back then--that was before email was really used)
• photos of my freshman dorm room (yes, there were Highlander movie posters above my bed, and in the photo I'm wearing a classic blue t-shirt with the Superman logo).
• birthday, halloween, valentines day, hanukkah, and other random holdiday cards and letters from 1992-1997

And I'm not done with this one box. Good grief!