Sentimental saver or hoarder: That is the question

RIVER VALLEY and OZARK AREA — I constantly walk the line between being a sentimental saver and a hoarder.

I have decided that I am going to embrace the quote from William Morris I keep seeing in the decorating magazines I’m addicted to: “Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful and believe to be beautiful.”

My younger son, who lives at home and goes to college, doesn’t ask for much.

When he asked me to replace his old dresser that I bought at an antique store, I was happy to do it. He said he didn’t care what it looked like; he just wanted the drawers to work.

So, I decided to switch it with the fairly new dresser in his older brother’s room, since older brother doesn’t live at home anymore.

That meant cleaning out younger son’s dresser, because I knew giving him the task would mean nothing would be saved. He doesn’t have a sentimental bone in his body.

Also, I’d taken over one drawer for some of my stuff.

So, while he was gone to a friend’s, I tackled it one drawer at a time.

The drawer I commandeered was full of collectible magazines, old postcards and newspapers.

I threw away a few special editions of newspapers and magazines (sorry, Kris Allen), but I kept more than I got rid of.

The top drawer was the mother lode — everything from baby shoes, elementary school work and crayon drawings to his high school diploma.

“I don’t need that,” my son joked about his diploma.

I gave him a stack of greeting cards to go through (we are a card-crazy family). He laughed a few times, but he put every one in a pile to throw away.

I went through them myself and kept 99 percent of them. I couldn’t throw away the card he got when my brother lived in New York and wrote a little poem on it. I had to keep the ones from his grandmothers that had sweet notes they wrote.

Then there were school papers and little drawings. One was a “Help Wanted” ad for a wife. When my 19-year-old was 9, apparently he wanted a wife who “must be nice, beautiful, smart, funny, honest and have an interest in video games.”

He told her she wouldn’t have to clean, because “I have 15 butlers.” He promised to give happiness to anyone he married. “My number is 329-HOT GUY.”

No way I’m throwing that away.

The spelling papers were even fun to see. My boys have always been excellent spellers, and just about every paper was 100 percent.

It was the sentences my younger son wrote that were telling. For example, one of his vocabulary words in third grade was self-discipline.

His sentence: “My brother has terrible self-discipline, so he has horrible consequences!”

(In reality, he could have learned a lot on that subject from his older brother.)

Those were in contrast to the little valentine I found where he wrote, “I Love You” in crayon to John.

Now I have to find a place for all this stuff I saved. Is it all useful? No. Beautiful? In my eyes, absolutely.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.