Bags

They came home with bags of "stuff" from their lockers, desks, and backpacks.  Bags stuffed with crayon boxes, papers that were graded, letters saying, "Dear Parents" that were dated from DecemberOctoberFebruary.  These were for events I missed or heard about as the boys were bounding out of the car when I dropped them off to school  There were projects that had hung on the walls, their name tag, pictures that were laminated onto musical notes shapes, five thousands pencils (it seems),  and crayons that have escaped of the 64 Crayon Box. 

They got added to the bags of things that are now lying around the living room that have nodesignated space.  The Man Who Puts Up With Me, in an effort to clean one day, shovelled everything into plastic bags and dumped them near the chair in which either of us frequented.  But with construction going on in 65% of the house, it's hard to know where to put some of it.

Now the boys have bags and boxes of their own, and I sit with them for an hour a day to go through them and make decisions.

"Your desk area," I say to the Oldest, "reminds me a bit of the Third Law of Thermodynamics."

He looks at me in fascination.  Some good information is about to follow.

"Yes," I continue.  "It reads a bit like this: 'All things left alone will result in entropy.' "

"What's entropy?" he asks, hanging on every word.

"Complete chaos."

He laughs and says, "Good one, Mom!" I send a silent prayer to have something nice happen to the professor who taught me that one. It's great to make the boys have a "Gee, Mom is cool!" moment once in a while.

So now that we are all bag people, a special effort is underway in the house to liberate our lives of all the extra paperwork. "Yes," I explain to Youngest, "we need  to keep the projects you've done. But we don't  need to keep every single piece of paper you've ever written on."

"But" he protests as he shows me how nicely he made the letter 'Q' on the paper, "this one says, 'A+ +! ' I can't throw that one away!" 

I nod, but sigh inwardly. He's a great student who has "A+ +'s written on many papers.  Images of a huge barn with paper like haymounds start to settle in the back of my brain.  I have the distinctive feeling we are going to drown in paper after paper.

I suppose its like that in life, too. My brain has little bags of memories that periodically get dumped out on the floor of my soul.  I sift through the painful ones and try to figure out where to throw them away.  But they end up getting stuffed back into a bag to resurface whenever something reminds me of that incident.

My children harbor their own bags of things in their souls, too.  Littlest One, all of eight, has a crush on a little girl that isn't interested.  It hurts me to see him carry this in a little bag of pain by his heart, one that pours out whenever they see each other.  Then there's the bag full of memories of Alaska that our Oldest One carries around, memories that he pulls out (after putting on his "rose colored glasses") to share with others. 

These things I can not change.  It's the physical bags off papers and STUFF that we need to deal with immediately.  So now we each will be given one big tote and that is it.  All memories have to be triaged.  We can not harbor every living second of our life any more than we can harbor every second of our brain.  I am thankful only the critically important things will stay for us.  And maybe we won't drown in bag after bag forever.