Friday, December 21, 2007

Lost Evidences of a Past Me

We've been busy cleaning the past 2 days. Bob's oldest sister Ann and her family are coming Sunday afternoon to spend the night, and then we have an appraiser coming on Thursday because we're refinancing our house. Yesterday we spent a good deal of time on the upstairs, and this morning we worked on the basement.

After we got the main part of the basement done, I went to straighten out what we call the playroom down there--the only unfinished part of the basement, the part where the water heater and furnace are. It's a good size room, though, so we have carpet down in the middle of it, and that's where the boys play Lincoln logs and army men. I rarely make them clean it up, so they love it, LOL. We also use it for storage, and we have boxes along one wall.

After I shuffled around some tubs of clothes, I noticed that some of the boxes on the floor had *gasp* water marks on them. Hmmm, I thought. How odd. These are book boxes-that can't be good. And it wasn't. The box that had the most damage was filled with notebooks sitting upright, so most of them had terrible mold and had to be tossed without a second thought. It was really hard though. There were some old high school yearbooks, and also ones from my international school in Okinawa. There were lots of notebooks from high school and college classes. These may seem like a no-brainer that I should have tossed years ago, but you know, it was always sort of comforting to have those papers downstairs. Like I may not remember how to solve a differential equation now, but look what I used to be able to do! It's like another beautiful language! This was me, before my brain atrophied and wasted away from having all these children! Also, I had a lot of school projects saved, from my state report ("Utah") in 5th grade all the way up to my senior project in college ("Transcriptional Regulation of the Human Apolipoprotein A1 Gene").

Some things weren't so bad off, and I left them out to dry while I think about what to do with them. I suspect that I'll have to throw many of them away too, but I guess I'm just sort of giving myself some time to get used to the idea. And some of the books I really want to salvage, like my vertebrate zoology lab manual, which I am sure will come in handy when the boys need to dissect things, especially if we just order the kits to do ourselves. I had also saved a great deal of stuff from my high school English classes that I was planning on using with the boys. I had a really great teacher most years in high school, and I think my grasp of grammar is pretty good because of him, compared to what I've heard a lot of other people talk about. We also had these killer cummulative vocab tests each week, and I have a lot of the lists, which I was planning on using. I have all that stuff sort of spread out everywhere, so we'll see what happens.

It was so discouraging though. I don't really save that much "stuff"--knick-knacks and things. But books are really important to me, and I felt such a sense of loss as I threw all these notebooks away. It's almost a loss of identity because those things are pretty much all the kids could page through that identified and proved the academic life I had before I had kids.

You may be wondering why I wasn't more concerned about the water and where it came from. The air conditioner empties water by where these boxes are. So I am positive that the boxes got wet back in the summer, which is why the mold in the boxes was so bad now.

5 comments:

Pilot Mom said...

Oh my heart aches for you, Claire. I know where you got the gene to keep that sort "stuff." I remember Mammy had books and "stuff" to look through which had been U Doc's, Nana's and A Lu's texts, etc and I always loved to pull them out and go through them.

Johanna said...

I must say I feel really bad for you. I have all my old text books -- the ones I thought worth saving for the future-- and my yearbooks upstairs in the bookshelves. However, all my old papers and newspaperlcippings etc. . . are in a box downstairs in the basement. Luckily I have them in a plastic storage tub on top of the stack-- so when the a/c drained this summer it didn't get my memories. I think I would die if I lost some of those things.

Speaking of high-school english. Anytime Russell complains about his 15 vocab words I tell him of the HORRIBLE vocabulary tests we had in Honors English. I no longer have those tests, but I have the best book. I will have to show it to you the next time we get together. Good luck drying things out.

Oh yeah, if you can't save the originals maybe scan them to the computer. We have a perfectly good scanner you all can borrow if you need one. It might be worth a try.

Anonymous said...

So sad! I know how you feel, cause I save the same sort of stuff. It's reassuring to know that at one point I was respected and appreciated for my academic prowess. True confessions--I sometimes read my old textbooks just to brush up on things I used to be able to do without thinking. My most useful skill now is changing poopy diapers efficiently. :)

Beverly said...

Oh, hugs to you! Our Ohio basement flooded twice during our 3 years there, and the second time was so horrible...we were out of town and returned to find the mess. It had reached into a storage closet where I had stashed many of my own growing-up things that my dad had brought to me not too long before it happened. Same thing, although most of what I actually had to toss were my favorite fiction books from childhood, such as Trixie Belden and Janette Oke series. Sigh. It ain't easy!

Joy said...

Claire I can totally identify with not wanting to throw those sorts of things away. I still have quite a few things from high school and college that I've saved. I will say I had to draw the line at saving Brian's parents yearbooks!! :) So, I know exactly where you're coming from. I will sometimes look at my Calculus notes and go - wow - I used to know what all of that meant! And then I get sad that I don't have a clue anymore as to what it means. From what I remember, though, most of it was "imaginary" so why did I need to know it anyway? :)