Misty Water Colored Memories

For those of you who don't know, my mother is battling cancer. I am not saying this to depress anyone or garner sympathy points, but I want to explain why yesterday was spent cleaning out my parents storage room. It was dirty and gross and a chore I avoided like the plague when I actually lived in my parents home. But, as my mom has been stressed out about the state of her storage room for the past few months and was going to be at the hospital for various procedures most of the day my brilliant sister in law made the suggestion that we actually take action and clean it out instead of sitting around worrying about her for a change.

So, armed with a box full of trash bags I sat in my car, parked around the corner from their home waiting for my parents to leave their house. A few minutes later I saw their front door open and shouted at Mia to duck (she thought we were pretending to be spies so she thought this was awesome.) A couple minutes after their car pulled away I went in and raided their fridge while waiting for Russ and Amy to show up, (the prospect of being covered in dust and cobwebs all day gave me a hankerin' for doritos, what can I say) When they showed up we quickly went to work.

After a few minutes I remembered that Russ is a big cry baby when it comes to throwing things away (The umbrella stroller that only has one wheel that mom used when I was a baby!!! We can't throw that away!) So I put him and my brother David on brute duty and they carried huge boxes and bags outside to Russ's truck to be taken to the dump. Amy (my brilliant sister in law) got stuck going through old photos because I am not patient enough for that, she also was keeping an eye on the little girls so that none of them would wander into the cleaning zone and get the Hanta Virus from all the evidence of rodent life.

After about an hour we invented a game of seeing which one of us children had kept the most things at mom's house over the years. Heidi won, she even had an old laundry basket full of dirty clothes thrown in there, along with about 40 boxes of letters to and from her while in Ireland on her mission. Russ came in a close second with folders full of incompleted assignments from high school and a shoe box full of self addressed stamped enevelopes that people gave him as he was leaving on his mission to France that he was supposed to use to mail all his friends letters. I however, lost by an embarrassing margin when all I could find of mine was my wedding bouquet and a mix tape given to me by a friend in fifth grade. (I lost the arguement that the gallon jug of water in the food storage labeled from the year of my birth should count.)

So all in all, it was a day of discovery. I discovered that either I was my parents most considerate child and took all my junk with me when I moved so that it wouldn't litter their house, or that they threw all my stuff away the minute my car drove out of their driveway because they really don't like me that much. And I discovered that my dad has an unhealthy amount of books that have to do with healthy eating. Seriously, I didn't know there were that many in existence. Also, Groovy Kind Of Love by Phil Collins was popular when I was in fifth grade.