Does it go or does it stay?

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you change your mindset. For many years I've thought "more is better". Keep things in abundance and you will always have all you need. Now that I've reached the senior state of life I've change my paradigm about owning so much. I've always taked about simplifying my life, but this year I'm actually putting it into practice. I don't need a lot of "things". I have all I want and need. With that philosophy I tackled the bedroom this morning. It wasn't that bad since I've been at this "getting rid of " stage for awhile now. But now I am ruthless in weeding out. For instance, every time (twice a year) that I go to the cosmetics counter at Estee lauder I buy a certain face cream when they are having their promotion which usually consists of not only the cream, but about 5 other small samples of products along with a really nice cosmetic bag or two. As you can imagine I've accumulated a lot of these bags. yes, I've used some, but today I found a whole bag of them. I kept 4 and threw away the rest. What a proud moment that was. Right in the garbage along with the bags went scuffed shoes, shoes I'll never wear, and old purses. Before you know it my closet was looking very good. I didn't start on throwing away any clothes today. I wasn't ready for that step yet and I already went through the closet once. My cleaning must have rubbed off on Don and he began cleaning his closet too. We both realize that we have kept things which meant something to us at one time, but no longer have a use. Don brought an old green bow tie to me and asked if I remembered it. I did. Once when we were a lot younger and partied a lot, he went to a local man's store and bought seven of these for my dad, his step dad, uncle, etc. and they all wore them out to the bar when we celebrated St. Patrick's Day. That sure brought back memories of fun times. Did we throw it away? No. But I did tell him that I needed to write that story and place it with the tie. When Don writes his memoirs we'll need that.