A very sad time has been had chez the FSHousehold recently. My seemingly indestructible, funny, warm, kind, generous 93 year old mother in law passed away at the beginning of February - God rest her wonderful soul. FSHubby was / is devastated - even when you know something will happen, is inevitable, in fact must happen, it can still be a shock. So we had the trek North to attend the funeral and stayed on a week to start clearing out a house that contained a lifetime plus of memories, art, antiques ... alongside huge amounts of utter cr*p!
She was of a generation that threw NOTHING away. The war babies (she was born in 1921 and lived through WW2, marrying an ex intelligence officer in 1949) held onto everything just in case. We found 100+ bars of soap! Wardrobes rammed with clothes - both hers & her husbands (who had passed away 18 years earlier ..!), 10 hat boxes each containing at least 2 big blousy (signature!) hats. Every drawer of every piece of furniture was rammed with a mix of critically important paperwork, empty envelopes and blank postcards, birthday cards & Christmas cards. We found boxes & boxes of slides from the '30's & the stereoscopic viewer on which to view them. Children's toys & Blue Peter Annuals from the 70's. In the pantry we found out of date rusting tins and half empty biscuit packets, We found broken tools and Tupperware containers full of bolts & screws. Just in case....you never know!
But we also found photo album after photo album, faces from the past and from our recent history smiling up at us. Grainy black & white images of the father in law I never met as a young man, sailing a Dhow down the Nile in the summer of 1943. Grinning, skinny & shirtless with his intelligence corps comrades in Aden in 1941. Beaming clutching my mother in laws hand on their wedding day. Then the images burst into colour as we hit the 50' & 60's. He & my mother in law cuddling FSHubby as a chubby baby, images of them sailing his yacht on the local reservoir and finally of him very ill cuddling a baby FSTeen. And the photos continued, right up until a month before my mother in law passed - family weddings, christenings, school photos, school plays, holidays, lunches & teas all the houses we've lived in - a whole family history.
So after numerous tip trips and charity shop runs we carefully packed up the memories as we prepared to head home. But when we got home I noticed FSHubby had inherited the 'keep the crap' gene ... I discovered broken toys and bits of seemingly pointless scrap paper and all manner of ancient oddities alongside the precious memories in the 4 big boxes that now languish in a garage ... Will get ruthless one day.
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