Cards.

   Barbara has been visiting Eleanor this weekend and and has been helping her sort  out her cards. Eleanor has hundreds of cards, mostly for birthdays in stacks in her apartment. Barb found cards from Janet that Eleanor received when Jan and Steve were in Greece, and an Easter card that her mother sent her a week before she died.
   I have undertaken the same project at least twice before, but after I get everything sorted, Eleanor wants to look at them and make sure that I haven't put anything in a pile that she might not want to throw away. We wind up with the cards resorted, but nothing thrown away. I would guess that Mary Ann has also had the card cleaning experience when she comes to visit.
   If a card has been kept for 50 years, she probably has some reason for keeping it. It is hard to decide what stays and what needs to go. I have things in my drawers that have been there for years because some attachment or memory keeps me from tossing the item. We have boxes at our house that seem to become fuller each time we downsize Eleanor's apartment. Glass birds, crocheted items that Aunt Margaret made, Shoji dogs  from Okinawa:  these items all represent a decision by Eleanor to not discard a memory that is somehow connected with the item. It is tragic that as peoples lives are downsized to ever smaller spaces, that the decisions as to what stays and what goes are being made for Eleanor and not by her.