Recently a friend pinged a bunch of us on a social site about spring cleaning. She offered a truck, a crew to help lift, and an opportunity do good. In exchange for doing spring cleaning and yard work, including hauling away stuff to the dump, we could make a donation to her favorite charity.

This appealed to me immediately. First, the children’s charity is a good cause, and would likely have chipped in dollars anyway, knowing my employer would do a match. And second, we had a shed to clean out, and stuff that had been quietly rotting under the deck, that we wanted gone.

780 pounds later, for the first load, and our yard was clearer than it had been for months. Another thing that lightened the load for me, personally, was letting go of boxes of papers that I hadn’t really looked at in 7 years, most of them things that had been transferred from closet to closet. It felt good to let go.

In the process I found a few treasures. Still-mint-in-box action figures from Babylon5 (and yes, I know that calls me out as a geek), and a signed script for the Babylon5 pilot, still pristine in plastic.

Yet one of the best things was the gift of the stuff going away. It was almost as simple as point-and-click; we’d point, and snap, those things went away. And in the end I got to donate to the charity, help a friend reach her fund-raising goal, and feel good about that too. Win.

Copyright 2012 R Loader all rights reserved