Stuff I Hoarded From My Childhood Home

I’ve been recently helping to clean out the house where I grew up in New York, in order to prepare it for selling.  Amongst thousands of yard sale and junk items, I rescued several childhood belongings that I wasn’t quite ready to part with permanently, including:

• Baseball cards (Donruss, Fleer, Score, Tops, Upper Deck:  1984-1991)
• Capsela
• Cassette tape of the Fox Lane Stage Band from 1991
• Cowboys & Indians
• Garbage Pail Kids
• Legos
• Lionel trains (standard “O” gauge)

Most this stuff is in amazing condition because I’ve always taken care of my things.  Apart from the Legos and the recording of my high school band, most of it will eventually find its way up onto eBay once I’ve had a chance to go through it and clean off the 20+ years of dust and grime.

In addition to the stuff above, I found a few other items, which didn’t belong to me originally, that I felt compelled to save from the yard sale or dumpster:

• Blower brush for cleaning my camera (had one sitting in my Amazon shopping cart, as of yet un-purchased)
• Cassette tape of my dad’s “Mean Snakes” from April of 1970
• Museum of Fine Arts Boston book, printed in 1969
• World’s Largest Crossword Puzzle  (unopened)

In the house, there are still plenty of artworks by my grandfather, Gaston Sudaka, that I’m hoping to preserve.  There are also hundreds of family photos and videos that I’d love to convert to digital format, so that I can share them all with the rest of the family.

It’s been an amazing and overwhelming experiencing going through 35 years of family accumulation. But if I’ve learned one thing it’s that it’d be much easier to do it a little every year than it is to wait half a lifetime to unburden yourself of unneeded items. It’s way easier to enjoy all of what you have when you don’t have so much stuff. Less is more.

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