One closet.

Two hundred plus journals.

Three big bins of memories.

If you’ve kept up with the Life of Gen, you’ll know that we last left our hero with a beautiful closet but a Very Cluttered Bedroom.

I managed to give away an entire carful of goodness to the Moberly Goodwill. Thank you, Moberly Goodwill person, for graciously accepting an odd assortment of items including: a leather laceup bodice from Castro Street in San Francisco, ten photo frames, a duck basket I originally got from the Goodwill in St. Paul and a 20-year-old plant stand.

Our trash collector was also kind enough to accept the extra trashcan full of items such as my wedding dress, broken hangers, my old paintings from when I painted along with the Jerry Yarnell show on PBS, my high school yearbook and muck boots with a hole in them.

Nothing nastier than mucking out a pony pen with holey boots!

In her decluttering book, Marie Kondo mentions that good fortune comes after we make space in our lives. After an experience this weekend, I believe it.

Letting go of my muck boots was hard. They were from my favorite brand. I have used these boots—my trusty horse care companions—for almost 10 years. Because it’s time to buy hay for the winter, I don’t have the money now to get new ones to replace the old. But it was time to let go. I threw the holey muck boots away.

After I give my donations to Goodwill, we stopped inside to see if there was anything interesting. What do you think I found there?

Hardly used muck boots in my size, for a quarter the cost of brand-new ones. I grabbed them and made them mine.

Like cleaning out the old hay to make room for the new, I still need to go through my three bins of memorabilia and make room for new memories.

Letting go of the old is a hard process. It is hard to trust that what we need will be there. But it will be.

I will keep on surrounding myself with items that bring me joy, like fresh hay and almost-new boots.

Keep on enjoying life and trusting that God will take care of you. He will!