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The (re)cycle of life!
What goes around comes around, the recycle of life.
I recall a story of a lady cleaning out the home of two deceased spinster aunts. They were frugal and meticulous hoarders and had a box room, where they stored everything in labelled and catalogued boxes. She was amused to find one small box labelled, Pieces of string too short to keep.
For me, that pretty well sums up the challenge of throwing stuff away. I never know when that little piece of string might be needed.
I find the annual January local Council kerbside collection a bittersweet process. Besides the challenge of letting stuff go, it is liberating to get rid of accumulated rubbish, but there is also the guilt of having so much disposable stuff. While not seasonally a spring clean, for me, New Farms’s January collection is a physical manifestation of the yearly resolution to get more organised.
When I was growing up, we didn’t seem to have much clutter. There was just less stuff, and we had a trailer, so there were regular trips to the tip. Those trips were mostly to dump garden waste, but to us, the rubbish tip was a spare parts supermarket in the never-ending pursuit of building the perfect go-cart. We retrieved fruit boxes, bits of timber, wheels, and axles from broken prams, carts, and trolleys. Our creations were rudimentary and powered by gravity and the…
