Spring Cleaning

Confession: I am a pack rat.
Unfortunately for him, I am married to a man who values order and tidiness. I don't know how he puts up with me sometimes.

This week, it's seems, he'd had enough, and he christened this the weekend for spring cleaning (ostensibly because we're having a yard sale in a few weeks, which is true, but I think really it's more about getting rid of all my useless crap).

The Smelmooo presented me with a list before I went to work yesterday, so I could think about what we might need to add. We went out to dinner last night, to a terrific new Portuguese place in town, and partway through dinner, out came the list, again, so we could divvy up the tasks. And then, oddly, I started getting excited about a weekend of cleaning and crossing things off the list.

There were some sitcom moments (I somehow ended up with a big smudge of grease on my cheek while I was cleaning the grill); some finally moments (I painted around our new thermostat, which is considerably smaller than our last one, and which has been surrounded by a two-inch patch of white on our green wall for about three months); and many, many nostalgic moments (I found a sixth-grade essay I wrote about my brother, which I wish I'd dug up a month ago, in advance of his 40th birthday party).

But the bulk of the nostalgia came from an activity that wasn't even on the list (where did I read recently that someone's pet peeve is "Doing things that aren't on my to-do list, so I can't get the satisfaction of crossing them off when I've done them"?): it seemed in the spirit of things to go through all of my old mix tapes, write up the song lists and make playlists or CDs of my favorites.

If you went to an all-girls' high school in the early-to-mid-'90s, you have some idea of what an undertaking this was.

I'm still only about halfway through, and I'm laughing and cringeing and gasping as I find songs I'd totally forgotten about. Here are some of the things, both predictable and surprising, that I've surfaced thus far during this walk down memory lane:

-- Practically every mix from 11th or 12th grade includes "These are Days" by 10,000 Maniacs.

-- An inexplicable number of tapes, including ones made by my guy friends, include songs from Disney movies, particularly The Little Mermaid and The Lion King (also prevalent: Muppets and Sesame Street songs).

-- I put this awesome Kermit the Frog song called "If I Were..." on a mix for my sister, and I had totally forgotten about it until I saw it today, at which point the entire thing came back to me in about 10 seconds, and I sang it all the way through.

-- I made another mix for my sister, called "Mi Hermana, Mi Amiga," but the title is the only thing that's legible on the cover; the ink has totally faded, the tape isn't in the case, and I have no idea what's on it. I'm hoping she has a copy, because it seems like it'd be a nice, mushy mix.

-- I had a weird obsession with the song "Labour of Love" by Frente.

-- I have the cassingle of "1, 2, 3, 4" by Coolio. I didn't even know they still made cassingles when that song came out, but I loved it.

-- Perhaps the most revealing self-made mix was my "Cheesy/Homey" mix; Side A featured '80s-hair-band-ballads; Side B included stuff like "Tootsie Roll" and "O.P.P."

-- To the Smelmooo's question, "Are there a bunch of mixes from old boyfriends in there?" I did discover a couple. But the most cringe-worthy is the two-volume set by a non-boyfriend, titled the "Mike [Heart] Tangent Mix," beginning with "Hold me Now" and closing with "Blue Eyes (Tangent's Song)," even though my eyes are actually not blue. Shari is rolling around on the floor laughing right now, by the way.

I wonder if, 10 or 15 years from now, I will be going through my collection of CDs, or my antiquated iPod play list, and experience this same emotional tug. My first thought was that I wouldn't, because in many ways I think my life will be very much the same 10 years from now. It seems unlikely that I'll listen to "Forever in Blue Jeans," our wedding song, and hear it with the same nostalgia that today accompanies my prom theme. But even as I typed that, I thought of how, every time I hear "Crazy in Love," I think of J and J rocking out at our wedding, and every time I hear "Hey Ya," I think of Minnams and her misinterpretation of the lyrics as "Shake it like a pony boy preacher."

Tomorrow, in addition to cataloguing the rest of the tapes, it's on to cleaning out the library, the basement and the attic. I'm thinking that all of my college and grad school papers won't evoke the same emotions and memories that the elementary school papers and the mix tapes did today, but with me, you never know what will have been place absent-mindedly in a box of school notebooks. I'm hoping I'll finally find that dress I haven't seen since September 2004.