My to-do list is much longer than my motivation.

It is November 21, 2025, and the white board on the refrigerator shows me what all I feel I need to get accomplished before the weather changes so much that I cannot work in unheated areas of the house and garage. The dumpster is calling out to me as it will be picked up on Tuesday and needs to be fed before then. As I contemplate the task before me, I am experiencing an urge to bury my head under the covers and refuse to ever come out.

Years of hoarding have come home to roost. Books from homeschool days, kid’s toys, baby clothes, my outdated apparel, Joe’s genealogy research, sewing materials and craft supplies, and so much more, the list is unbelievable and unending. Added to the list is boxes upon boxes of items from my mother’s home that I have never been able to face since she died in 2016. It will be 50 years next month that we first moved into this house, and I have struggled to part with “treasures” since long before that.

Fifty years, it doesn’t seem possible! I have held on to so much because of memories and an inability to face leaving the past behind. I realize that my mother was also a victim of hoarding, but at least she was organized. I am a cram-it-in-bags and boxes and hide-it-in-all-areas of the house pack rat. Nowhere was safe from my disorder. Garage, attic, cellar, balcony, front porch, all were equally fair game for my sickness. Our kids are out of the house, but items of theirs still reside here as well. Auctions were a source of fun for Joe and me, too, and that did not help us at all. Hence, the clutter in the garage!

What about the every day present was so unnerving that I held so tightly to detritus from years gone by? I have come to realize as I wade through the clutter that much of it is not junk; it is perfectly usable items that I just could not bear to lose. My grandmother’s fancy tea set is languishing in my china closet; her antique meat grinder and other cooking implements are in my kitchen unused–except for her old cookie sheets and the Wonder Cup measuring cup that I utilize to this day when I bake. She also had a smaller blue one. The yellow one is past ready for retirement, with a long crack down the side. Yet, I still keep it.

I have the black lunch pail my grandfather carried when he worked for the Cromar oak flooring factory in Williamsport, as well as the draw knife he used skinning bark from logs when we lived in the country. My mother had a Belgium lace piano scarf my grandmother’s brothers brought home from World War I; it is now mine. Soon, I will have to get the 1939 World’s Fair Christmas ornaments from under my mother’s eaves, and the vintage glass balls and bells she used on her tree every year.

My children never knew my grandmother who died in 1963, and our oldest son was the only child who experienced knowing my grandfather, who passed in 1983. Will they want any of the memorabilia that has meant so much to me? Likely not, unfortunately. I don’t know if they will even want any of the items that meant so much to their grandmother. Sentimentality is not a strong suit in today’s generations for the most part. They have their own struggles in today’s world that impact them so much that vintage family items mean little.

Memories! I could blame my advancing years as the reason I look back so much at earlier times and hold them so tight, but I have done that my whole life. The present has become so unsettling in America that the past is more desirable to contemplate at this point. That’s sad and very disheartening. I guess I’ve always been there.