Not only was moving hard, but getting ready to move forced me to go through every single little thing in my home. Junk drawers? Do you have junk drawers? I can’t believe how hard it was for me to let go of the stuff in my junk drawers.

Did I need to take all the birthday candles stuffed in a drawer in the kitchen that the I might need it someday mindset wouldn’t let go. I inherited those what ifs from my mom. She and her family went through the great depression and it was something none of them forgot. Many people of that age group kept everything. But candles? Couldn’t I buy them where we moved? And birthday candles are not a big purchase but yet….

When my mom died I had so many items left from her that were from the times she grew up in, and the house in which I grew up for part of my life, my Grandma Krock’s house. None of them were worth anything to anyone. There was no monetary value and now I had to weed them out or let go of them all. There were two old unsightly pieces that I struggled with.

One was a mirror that was battered and cloudy and didn’t enhance much. I had the mirror hanging outside my bathroom door. It was a mirror that for as long as I could remember, hung over the sink in my grandmother’s house, which became my mom’s house. I imagine they put it there so they could see behind them what was happening while doing the dishes, because otherwise they would have been looking at a blank wall. How boring would that have been? I don’t know why that mirror touched me so much.

I wanted to bring it along to my new home. I’m sorry I didn’t. I guess the writer in me and the dreamer in me imagined all the mirror could reveal to us about the happenings in that home. What would one see if they could looked in the mirror, and the mirror revealed the secrets of the past occupants ? I took a picture of the mirror, thanked it for it’s journey with our family, and left it behind.

Sitting on a shelf on my porch was an old lantern that doesn’t work anymore, or maybe it would if I could find a vintage battery for it. That old battered lantern is now sitting on my kitchen table by the window. My Uncle Frank, and I will write about him later on the year, but my Uncle Frank who was a like a dad to me too, always carried that lantern. I can see him with it in his hands. He used it to check on the cows and horses and chickens at night. It always sat by the door. He never wanted a new one. It lighted his way through good times and bad. It kept him safe on his chores in the dark and there were many. He lighted the way for me when I would walk at night between the neighbors when I was little, and it lit up the house when the electricity failed.

I kept the lantern and I have it sitting where I do for it to remind us of the light in our lives. The light from the past reminds me that it lights the way to the future.

Those are my heart saves. What are yours? The heart doesn’t pick because of money or fame, it chooses wisely that which connects us to who we were, where we came from and who we have the possibility of becoming because of our those who went before us. We need to treasure and hold that dear.