yonmei

yonmei @ 11:09 pm: Giving things away and keeping things
My mum had located two boxes of stuff in their house - and a bag with my old sub aqua gear, fins / mask / snorkel - which were mine. I collected them on Sunday, opened them up, and discovered that my plan - to put contents directly into bag for Bernardos to collect today - was more complicated:

This was my old collection of boxes, wrapped for packing sometime years ago. Goodness knows how long ago: most probably when my parents moved from St Catherines's Place, where I lived till 1986, and they lived till 1988. (By which time my sister had also left home, and my parents had a too-big house which was really too expensive for them to run.) That wasn't itself a problem: these was stuff I'd not seen in over 20 years, and I figured if I hadn't missed them in two decades, they could go to charity and be bought by someone else.

The problem: Some of the boxes had things in them. Some of this wasn't intrinsically a problem - a collection of sweeties, hard sugar from quarter of a century ago, some old old chestnuts, a box of tea - all of which could go, and did: but, what I kept, eventually, was:
- a box of buttons (my sister collects them); three wooden elephants of varying sizes (afrai might like them); the straw hen that hatched stray foreign coins and banknotes (on the basis that it's slightly foolish to throw out money without looking at it); a small chest with hares painted on it that I had used to store shiny jewellery (Ajay's having a party on Sunday: this would make a good pirate's or princess's treasure chest if she wants one); - all of these with the plan to get rid of them shortly, either to the named recipients, or just to a charity shop.

But what I kept, and mean to keep:
- my first chess set (pure sentimentality: I don't even play chess much any more);
- a box with halfpennies and one half penny (because it still strikes me as amusing);
- a memento mori box, which I had - beginning, I think, when I was about 12 - put things into that meant something to me. For about four years. Some of the items I still remember what they meant to me: some I have no idea. But it's an odd collection, odder even than the fourth box, which was:
- a small box with smaller items in it: four discs of metal mesh, that I think once looked golden; a flat portrait in china of a red-cap mushroom; a minature beaded scarf in two shades of green; a tiny brown china jug; two small dominoes from two different sets, one black and one green, both with pips adding up to seven, though different patterns; a wooden knight and a pawn from a travel chess set that long since disintegrated; a bead made out of an irregular shape of wood like a ring of bark; the head of a glass penguin; two tiny plastic wineglasses; a pin with a black glass head; a tiny fork, two knives, and two spoons, from a dollhouse set of cutlery the rest of which is long since lost; a rooster and three wise monkeys, both made of yellow plastic, out of a Christmas cracker; four counters for a game, two red, one green, one yellow (tiddlywinks, I think); and the jawbone of a stoat, that was old and dry when I found it, about three decades ago.

But everything else, along with two bags of other stuff I'd been piling up for a while, got put out in front of my garden, with a sign on it for Bernardo's, and they came by some time during the day and collected them and now they're gone. For good.

There's a free shop at the Forest this Sunday and next Sunday, and more stuff is going then. Yay.