Just in case

Spring cleaning at the voodoo bungalow is no small thing. We are all messy people with squirrel-like proclivities--there are, in fact, peanuts stuffed down the sides of the couch, just in case. Luke never met a photocopied conference programme from 1987 or a grade sheet from three years back in a different country that he didn't want to keep, just in case. Elvis hides socks all over the place, just in case. I cannot throw out anything that has the handwriting of a loved one, just in case. (Just in case it turns out to be the last thing they wrote or just in case my action starts the wheel turning and something bad happens next. I am clearly the craziest one. Yay me!)

But this year I'm getting serious about this whole down-sizing thing. That means it is time to say goodbye to some of the mommy hoard.
--plastic bag full of baby spoons, one with a tiny toothmark. I don't know if this is Lief's toothmark or one that was there when the spoon was passed down. I might have been hoarding a spoon with my 15yo niece's toothmark on it, which would cause her to roll her eyes and say "Eww, gross."
--two pieces of gravel that might have been given to me/thrown at me by my baby at the swings park. Or might have simply fallen out of one of his socks.
--one "Tiny Swimmer" disposable bathing suit in size 9mo. I kept it because "tiny swimmer" reminded me bitterly of how I got to be in the predicament of being in my bathing suit, lumpy and old and disheveled and now also wet, in public, with strangers, at 8.30 on a Wednesday morning, in the FIRST PLACE. One of the things I'd like to have less of is bitterness.
--that's not true. I love bitterness. It smells like victory. I want more.
--the earring that Lief found underneath our table at Brava, the first time he went anywhere with us. That was also the last time he went anywhere with us, for a very long time. That was the night he also found and ate someone's lipstick under the table at Brava. Well, he actually found it in someone else's purse under someone else's table at Brava. . . . It was actually a really nice shade and I kept it to try and match it against different brands at the cosmetics counter at the downtown Bay one afternoon. This is an episode in my life that I should probably try to forget. Farewell, baggie containing someone else's half-eaten lipstick from 6.5 years ago!
Scared yet?
I originally wrote "sacred yet?" And now I'm worried that there are no mistakes, Freud is 100% spot on and if I throw these things out I will be losing some holy part of my life. Something sacred and memorable, deep, religious, chthonic, powerful. I could be losing something important forever.
Good enough.
Out. The. Door.