Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

EvgeniT via Pixabay

Sitting in my family room is a poster-board sized piece of corrugated cardboard covered in toddler drawings -- shapes, mostly. At the top, in pink, it says "mommy" and "Leah" in letters clearly created by a preschooler. My daughter remembers this as our puzzle board -- the portable home for jigsaw puzzles in progress.

This is all well and good and warm and fuzzy. The problem? The toddler who created the board will turn twenty-one in November.

We unearthed this masterpiece when we moved a piece of furniture from our house to my dad's apartment the week before we went on vacation, which means this lovely piece of artwork has been propped up in our family room making a decorative statement for two weeks now. (In my defense, we weren't here for one of those two weeks).

From a function perspective, it's not terribly useful (although I could use it as an excuse to pull out a jigsaw puzzle). From a storage perspective, it has no purpose whatsoever (it takes up space), and from a style perspective...let's just say the memories outweigh the decorative value.

There is next to no logical reason for me to keep this, but I know I will. It's large, but flat and it won't be difficult to find a home for it, most likely behind another piece of furniture.

While my Type A organizer friends are shaking their heads, I'm sure those with an I love stuff personal style completely understand.

We all have these items in our homes. There's no logical reason to keep them, but, on some level, they mean something to us, and so we find them homes. As long as our treasures aren't unwieldy, part of an enormous collection, dangerous or otherwise a hazard, I can't think of a single reason not to keep them.

Organizing by STYLE is not about shrinking our collections to their smallest possible size any more than it's about organizing things in one specific way. Life is full of things we can toss painlessly and, over time, the things we've hung on to either earn their keep or they don't, and logic may or may not be part of the decision-making process.

So this evening, I will tuck that very special, impractical board away again. I'll probably forget about it until I move the piece of furniture I tuck it behind, or until we're specifically looking for that board in order to use it.

And for me, this will be infinitely more painless than adding it to our pile of recyclables.