hoarder, or historian?

Really ,there are two ways to look at those who save things.

I believe I have shared with you my penchant for saving magazines, in a previous post.  So if you really could care less about my little problem, please feel free to move on to your next blog for the day. 

As with many things, I am sure I can point to something in my childhood that causes me to ADORE magazines.  The little thrill that goes through me when I open the mailbox and there, in all of it's glory, is a shiny, fresh new issue, full of possibility.  (simple pleasures, you know)

I do remember magazines in our house, growing up.  Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Woman's Day, and Better Homes and Garden.  But they didn't all belong to my mom, she and her friends would each subscribe to a different title, and they would pass them around after they were done reading.  So if you really liked a recipe, or a decorating idea, you had to write it down (unless of course it was from the one magazine that was yours, but you had to wait for it to return to you, which sometimes didn't happen).  My dad received Outdoor Life, it was usually in the bathroom, where I believe is the only place he did any reading. 

On the very rare occasions when we took a trip (I called our yearly week of camping at Midge Lake each summer a trip, even though it was only 10 miles out of town), we got to splurge on a fresh magazine, that we acutally purchased at Pamida, for the event.  A new Teen Beat, with hopefully pictures good enough to put on my bedroom wall when we returned home.  And my mom would get a new one as well, maybe something really scintillating, like Redbook, and she could share it with the other moms when they got together for coffee each morning during that week of camping.  Redbook was considered quite racy back then, and she made sure to keep it from my curious eyes.

In college, magazines were considered a luxury, but I did occasionally get a good deal on Glamour, even though the first year my roommate usually nabbed it before I got a chance to read it all the way through.

And now, I get too many magazines.  There are so many great deals out there, but one needs to realize how much time one actually has in one's life to read magazines.  Because I can't just read it, and then put it in recycling.  I have to go through it once, and mark all of the pages I need to save.  Then a while later I need to go through it again, to make sure I didn't miss anything, then tear out the really good stuff.  And then I have to file those pages away, for future use.

Really, future use?  Of all of the things I have saved and carefully filed over the years, how much of it have I actually gone back to?  And what about the boxes of magazines in my attic that are waiting to be thumbed through and torn out and filed?

This week, I am going to recycle all of the old issues.  The only ones I can keep to go through are the ones sitting in my living room. 

oooo, just saying that made me a little nervous.  Can I really let them go?

If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, and someone had to go through all of my stuff, would they think I was nuts, or really smart for saving all of that valuable information?  Would they quickly dump all of my carefully collected files of goodness in a brown paper bag, to be set on the curb, or meticulously arrange all of the gems I have saved and publish them in a book, "How to do Everything in Your Whole Life Really Well"?

Am I a hoarder, or a historian?  I can tell you which one Mike thinks I am....