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Make new resolutions that affect your life instead of just the year By MARY JANE HOLT For those of you who keep asking if you missed my column on resolutions no, you did not, because I did not make any. Not a single one. Didn't give New Year's Resolutions any serious contemplation this year. Yet, I am moving a new direction. I am becoming more organized. And more than just a tad this time. But the movement started last year. Though it has nothing to do with New Year's Resolutions, it may have everything to with New Life Resolutions. Following my surgery last August, and the complications, and horrible depression that followed, when I really wanted to die for a time, I kept thinking about how disorganized my attics were. Yes, my attics. There's one on the front side of my house and on the back. There's one on top too, but I don't use it yet. (I designed our home, in Pagemaker, as an open floor plan with lots of hidden storage space.) My grandchildren refer to the storage space as the hot attic or the cold attic, depending on what time of year it is, and they love to explore every corner. Great storage space is what these attics should be, but over the past couple of years they have become stashing space instead of neat storage space. When we moved into this home in 1997, I declared I would never do that again. Just stash stuff, that is. We had lived in the same home in Fayette County for 28 years, and when we moved I discovered what a stasher I had become. I thought never again, but that internal declaration just didn't hold. There still may be hope though. I am extremely thankful for the faith and prayers of so many individuals who stood by me last year, because I can assure you it wasn't my own faith that pulled me through. About the only thing I did to keep me looking forward to getting well was to occasionally think about all that clutter I'd be leaving behind for someone else to contend with if I died! I'm not kidding. I reached a point where that became my only real focus for living. I didn't want to leave a disorganized private world behind for family and friends to deal with. When you are as spent as I was, as totally exhausted, as ready to give up, you'll latch on to anything, I suppose, that will keep you going. I reckon it may have been my love for others that prompted such a line of thinking. I remembered being so thankful that my dad put all his affairs in order prior to his open heart surgery, in 1988, that resulted in his death five days later. I think that was such an act of love on his part to have crossed every T and dotted every I. Yep, in a strange kind of way I still wanted to keep on loving others, even when I wanted to die. And now that I have begun ordering my private world, I realize I just might live forever if I refuse to give up and die before I have my life all neat and organized! I keep calling it "my life" because the clutter consists of personal writings and drawings, as well as art work made by my children, and numerous clippings that mark events which have impacted all our lives. Those kinds of things are stashed amidst tons of other "stuff" that I always say I will think about sorting through tomorrow. We say tomorrow never comes, but we are wrong. It came for me last year. When my tomorrow came, and I began to explore my attic stash, I discovered all the prints I have purchased over the past few decades and never framed. Oils and watercolors of old home places with pretty quilts hanging on the line or across a fence. Retired farm equipment rusting in the yards of a bygone era. Blue birds singing on a fence post that has learned to lean with the passing of time. I wrote down the size of all my prints and have started looking special frames. I cannot afford to have all of them professionally framed, but I will frame them this year and hang them on the wall in our play room. Shucks, there's no telling where I might hang them. I want to see them! They have been hidden away far too long. So, though there are no New Year's Resolutions, I'm happy with many of my New Life Resolutions. Life is really good, it's hard to believe I wanted to walk out on it less than six months ago!
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