Final Giveaway

I'm finding that I hate documenting every single thing that I give away. It's frustrating, futile, even, trying to find significance in meaningless things; things that hold no value for me: The too-small socks. The hardware we'll never use. The three hundred or so thumbtacks that were used to paper all four walls of my daughter's last bedroom with covers from Newsweek: faces of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, mainly, but others as well. These covers will not go up on my daughter’s walls in our new house, not because she's no less of a democrat, but because the plaster walls in this old home are unfriendly to thumbtacks, and even if they were more accommodating to those tacks, I would forbid her from putting up so many pictures in this new room of hers: When we put the old house on the market, the painter we hired had to double skim coat her bedroom walls before applying paint.

What I'm most amazed at, and dismayed by, is the realization that I have so much stuff to get rid of. In a world of need, I need to get rid of things. I am ashamed that I have accumulated so much to begin with, so much that I have a year's worth of things to write about. I am embarrassed to celebrate this giving away, this clearing out of excess in such a public way. As so, I will continue to simplify my life by shedding things no longer useful to me--but more quietly from now on.

I find as I give things away, they leave tiny gaps in my life like so many holes in a bedroom wall.

Gaps I will skim over and paint upon and, eventually, forget about entirely.

Kelly Garriott Waite on Google+

Great 365 Day Purge - Days Eleven and Twelve

January 11, 2014

Days Eleven (and Twelve!) of "The Great 365 Day Purge of 2014."

And speaking of growing...

I went in for my physical the other day. Had that horrible stepping-on-the-scale moment (after slipping out of my boots, of course). Height. Blood pressure. The whole bit.

The doctor told me my blood pressure was good. I thought it seemed high. She told me the standards had changed. What was once considered pre-hypertension was now within the acceptable range. My weight, too, is now acceptable: Apparently I'm just a smidge overweight, despite the fact that my BMI puts my body fat at twenty-five percent. As we've grown as a nation, the doctor informed me, the standards have expanded to accommodate us.

This reminds me of the day my teacher explained the changes to the grading system to my third grade class. Whereas before, a student needed a ninety-six to quality for an A, now, the only requirement was a ninety. Suddenly many more people became A students. And while I'm certain I benefitted tremendously from this deflation of standards (especially in chemistry, geometry and physics), the change felt a little like a cheat to me.

Read more »