My Closets Are Empty But My Heart Is Full

We are doing a little remodeling around these parts...  And by we, I mean my husband.  The carpet in the downstairs bedroom and bathroom needed replacing approximately 15 years ago.  Not putting carpet in a bathroom at all would have been my first choice, but since I was four when this house was built and my family wasn't involved in the building of it, no one asked my opinion.  So carpet it is.  

But not anymore...  Today that nasty carpet met it's maker.  Well, not really, but it did get, quite literally, kicked to the curb.  Take that, you shag carpet.  And don'tcha come back no more, no more, no more, no more.

My lovely role in all of this was cleaning out the room and three closets.  Yes, a dream come true.  Three closets.  Until it's time to empty of all of their contents.

I'm still recovering.

Oh the things that I save, people.  I had a beautiful collection of card board boxes.  Priceless, I'm sure.

Much of my time this weekend has been spent going through my greeting card collection.  This one is priceless, in the eyes of this words of affirmation lovin' gal...  I loved holding cards that my dear gram selected just for me.  And reading of the exploits of all my girlfriends, some of them from nearly 20 years ago. 

WHAT?  2o years?  I'm not that old, are you that old?  Because I'm not that old.

Really though, where does the time go?

I love going through years of cards in one sitting to see that my mother-in-law gave me the same birthday card two different times, so did my dad - but he takes the cake with giving me the same Valentine's card three different years!  He says he must of really liked what it said.

One of the biggest blessings, though - is seeing card after card from the same friend saying how important I have been in her life and how priceless and irreplacable our friendship has been to her.  And another friend who said, no less than 7 times, on different occasions, that she hopes all the good I've done for others would come back to me.

It's one thing for someone to write something sweet on a card, then you read it and think, wow - that's really sweet.  But to be able to sit down on a Sunday afternoon years after the words, sometimes the same exact words, have been written over and over again, and read through dear friends' heartfelt messages and the best part, to be able to still call them your closest friends?  That just blessed my heart like nothing else.

So even though my closets are empty, which of course means the rest of my house is a DISASTROPHY, my heart is filled to overflowing with the loving words of the dearest friends anyone could ever hope to have in 10 lifetimes.  And that is worth countless hours of sorting through all of the random junk that I've been collecting all these years.