They say it's my birthday

Well, actually, yesterday was my birthday. Forty-eight years ago on Monday at about 10 a.m., I made my first entry into the world. It was not a propitious beginning. My mother, being somewhat ahead of her time, was trying to give birth without pain medications and struggled against the doctor as he insisted she have demerol. Long story short, the needle broke off in her arm, she got a hefty dose and I was born a little bit drugged. Oh, and the doctor slit the top of my head during the episiotomy. Really, it had to go up from there, right?

That said, I'm not feeling particularly enthusiastic about my birthday this year. Maybe it's the old thing. I look in the mirror these days and, well, I feel old. Plus, we're super-busy. My oldest (affectionately known around here as Thing 1) is graduating from high school and there are parties and arrangements and college things to deal with. My youngest (that would be Thing 2) is right at the end of a long soccer season and we've spent three of the past five weekends out of town. Plus we just moved my mother from one senior facility to another which went about as well as something like that can go which is to say it was hideous.

Is it any wonder I'm not feeling festive?

That said, for my birthday, I asked for my whole family to spend all of Saturday cleaning out the garage. We needed to all be there to make decisions on what to toss and what to keep. I wanted the kids to be the ones making the decisions about their stuff and my boyfriend to be making the decisions about his stuff. Turned out it was a good thing. I would have totally guessed wrong.

My boys wanted to keep an ancient pastel drawing I'd done of the cat we had when they were little, but had no sentimental attachment whatsoever to their father's old leather motorcycle jacket. That would not have been my guess at all. Seventeen year old boy? I would totally have gone with the cool leather jacket from Brazil with a pocket that was ripped in a motorcycle accident rather than a poorly rendered sentimental drawing of a black cat asleep on a table with a lace tablecloth. I would have been wrong.

Of course, they remember the cat, but they don't remember the motorcycle (he got rid of it before they were born). Still, it got me to thinking about what we have sentimental attachments to. I would not have predicted that I would have blithely tossed my wedding dress with the little matching hat and shoes onto the Goodwill pile and burst into tears when I ran across my father's down jacket with the duct tape patching on the right shoulder. No one will ever wear that jacket. It's still in the garage.

So now I'm thinking about what my heroine might have her in her garage and what it might say about her. What do you all have in your garages?