Dear Tidyish: What to do with old love letters (and paper trails)?featured
Dear Tidyish,
Ok, I have a question- I have boxes of stuff in my basement that I haven’t gone through in ages, and a fair amount of (gulp) old love letters. Or maybe not even love letters, but correspondence with ex-girlfriends. What does one do with those? Just toss ’em? Seems callous. Then again, I haven’t read them in…well, 30 years, at least. What doth an expert say? -Joel R.
Dear Joel,
OHMYGOODNESS I love this question! As I told Joel, I’ve had a project dealing with this exact (or exact-ish) problem in the works for close to a year! Sentimental paper clutter. It is the best, it is the worst, it is going to bury us alive. But no longer!
(Buckle up, Joel- and others: This is a roundabout way of answering your “what to do with old love letters” question, and ending the paper clutter whack-a-mole once and for all!)
I’ve been helping a few clients through this very issue- some for office pile-ups, some for kiddos’ art projects- but I decided to be real, come clean, and air out my own dirty li’l secret: I am sentimental as heck and moved into our current home with three gigantic storage boxes containing my personal paper trail from June of 1980 onwards.
So to show you how non-terrifying this process can be, I guinea-pigged myself. Over the course of a year, I filmed the process of scanning, sorting, recycling, rinsing, and repeating- all while watching five seasons of The Office in increments ranging from 20 minutes to an hour apiece. (Honestly, I probably could’ve gotten all of this done in a few weekends, but the setting up of the camera was the part that took the longest amount of time.)
Bonus points if you can see the kids, cats, and husband wandering through many, many of the decluttering sessions! Proving that a) there’s no “good” time to start, b) there’s no “bad” time to start, and c) I am never, ever alone. Now, your turn!
Gather……
…up every.last.bit.of.paperwork you can find. It’s like with any other decluttering project- you can’t begin until you know exactly the size of the beast you’re gonna slay. If you have to stack bins and baskets in the corner of the living room? So be it. Here’s what will NEVER work: Leaving the paper piles in various rooms, grabbing a fistful to “deal with” once every month or so. It’s Band-Aid time, people: We’re gonna rip it off, it’s gonna look gross, and then it’s gonna get better. (Promise.)
Decide…
…which items you need to keep a hard copy of, and which ones will be necessary/useful/nice to revisit in digital form. For my own forever storage, I kept physical items like handwritten notes from my kids, one or two cards like the ones with my Dad’s signature or my Nana’s request that I split halfsies of any casino wins, and artwork- theirs or mine!- that make me really, really happy to keep. (Pro tip: Trust your gut. You know the difference between something you need to hold in your hands and things that will create the same amount of fuzzies when seeing in a digital folder. Take Facebook memories, for example: That pic from 8 years ago? That ain’t your friend/baby/corn dog in real life, but I’m betting it still made you smile.)
Get …
…the right tools! I love my Epson portable scanner wand for slightly larger pieces of paper and anything I’d like to combine into a PDF, but lately I’ve been singing the praises of the good ol’ smartphone. Think about it: The resolutions we can now get on these cameras is pretty darned crisp! And did you know that the Notes app on iOS and the Dropbox app lets you scan and save within the opened app? Notes saves to your phone, and Dropbox immediately uploads to your personal storage. Clearing out anything with sensitive data? Make sure you have a shredder, a plan to drop a few bags off at a shredding service or, in a pinch, a plan to soak ’em all in water for a few hours. (And I always like to keep a list handy of how long to keep each kind of important document. Here, like this one!)
So…what to do with old love letters and these treasures NOW?
For a largely sentimental project like this, I just jumped in and sorted as I went. As I worked, I asked myself, is this a “forever” document? (Valentines from P.J., handprint artwork from my kids, my signed ‘Quantum Leap’ script?) If so, those (few!) documents went into a separate pile for that family member. Is it more a “my kids will love to see this when they’re doing Throwback Thursdays as adults?” Scan, baby, scan. The rest? (And you know what the rest is.) Recycle it, make it into a hat- whatever- just move it on out.
What about forever storage?
Depending on your desire to see these items on the regular (as well as any space constraints), here are some great options to store (and adore) your treasures:
Give each family member a scrapbook (or binder with plastic sheets!) to preserve those truly important items. If you keep it at a hard limit of one book apiece, it’s easier to make those hard choices. (Although, by this point in the game, you’ve probably realized how few things you truly need to have in your hands in order to appreciate.)
Take your favorite scans and create artwork or keepsake books for school years, vacation highlights, or whatever your newly decluttered heart desires.
And my personal favorite: Give each family member a tiny flash drive with their scans, separated into folders dated for each year. (You can go as label-happy as you’d like, but I’ve found that a simpler system- allowing you to easily access special things from year to year- works the best.) And make sure to have a backup copy of these scans on an external hard drive- two, if you can- and keep one with your important papers, preferably in a fireproof lockbox. I mean, you just did all of this legwork- back that data up!
Still with me, Joel?
Hella long story kinda short, go through those keepsake boxes and give a good listen to what your brain and heart are telling you. THAT is what to do with old love letters (and other sentimental paper accumulation). Is this a farewell tour for your memorabilia? Any chance you might want to glance at these letters in your dusty twilight and think to yourself- MAN, I was awesome? And sometimes- just sometimes- the act of scanning special papers gives you the baby step of safely saying goodbye (or so long for now) to stuff in a guilt-free way, leaving you lighter for the journey.
This li’l bit o’ zen was free. Happy hiking down memory lane!
