'Tis a Gift to Be Simple

I spent much of this afternoon excavating Cold Comfort Cottage's spare bedroom, the scary "alligator room," as we finally get around to consolidating our homes.

My goals were pretty modest today: Throw out the mattresses; throw out the chest-of- drawers. The latter belong to the 70's-era three-piece bedroom set that my parents bought for me when I was middle-school age, that made the move to CCC when I was in college and my parents sold the farm to move to the lake. This furniture is cheap, crappy particleboard, in a style that is retro but not in a good way, with a dark walnut finish. It also spent time in our dank Michigan basement, which only adds to the general yuck factor.

So I wasn't too sentimental about tossing out the first third of this bedroom set.

But I did get a little misty glancing through a couple of old diaries I kept when I was in about third grade, that for some reason had wound up in one of the drawers. The little books were tatty and mildewy and made me sneeze when I picked them up, so keeping them was pretty much out of the question. But I enjoyed re-visiting my thoughts as an eight- and nine-year-old; what I thought was worth writing down at the end of the day.

"Shelley was mean to me. We had fish for dinner. I played with the cats."

"I walked by the ditch. I saw a herrin and some frogs. Lunch was good."

Samuel Pepys it ain't. But there's something charming about the simplicity of a little kid's reflections on each day. It's very Zen; you have a thought, you note it and move on. It made me a little sad, comparing my old diary to the complexity of my adult life.