Day 2

The twenty-seven things that I remove from my space today are here and there. One of them was a lone button that I find, that's needed to be sewed on a dress from whence it was missing. With needle in my hand, I got rid of the loose pocket on the inside of a sweater that needed to be fixed from this time last year.

Perhaps, some of the loose ends are coming to an end, I say to myself in gratitude.

The rest of the items to discard this day come from a basketful of odds and ends that date back some dozen years ago. There is an almost used up match cover, some vacuum-packed cold medicine and relatively worthless odds and end that fill out the rest of the quota .

There’s few cards, a few books, an odd phone cord that has no real purpose, some worn potpourri and a manual for a phone that I no longer have.

Stephen shows me the linen closet and tells me that there are 27 things to remove there. “What do we do with the worn towels?” he wants to know.

I tell him we take them to the Salvation Army and depend on them to recycle them into rags. The Salvation Army is that mechanism that takes our unwanted goods, and uses a bit of alchemy to change them into rags or treasures, depending on your perspective.

Somehow, as I go through this process, I find that unique alchemy is in all of our lives, in one form or another.