Bye Bye

I love stuffed animals, always have.  When I was a kid, I collected them; and I don't mean that I had a bunch piled in the corner or the closet.  I had hundreds of stuffed animals, that I practically treated with kid gloves.  Early on, my dad put up a shelf on my wall to hold them, and he had to add more shelves every year.  By the time I was a teenager, I had shelves on all walls, circumventing the entire room twice.  There were at least a few hundred of them, from all over the world.

Somehow, when I grew up, I skipped the step where I stopped loving stuffed animals.  For the most part, I've stopped buying them, but that doesn't mean that I'm any less attached.

A few years ago, I went through the collection and sorted out the stuffed animals that weren't top notch, high quality animals in perfect condition.  Those ones went to the Edmonton SPCA.  That left me with about 12 bags of stuffed animals - Gund quality or better and in mint condition.

Now, I do realize that I'm pushing forty, and that a single woman of my age with a house full of stuffed animals could raise some red flags.  It's occurred to me a number of times that I should get rid of them, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I kept telling myself that I'd find a charity who could put them to good use, but I never did.   ...You guessed it, they were in the flood.

While they were all in garbage bags, the bags were old.  Many of the bags had holes, and the animals got wet and then sat in plastic bags for over a week.  I can't in good conscience give them away.  I thought of sorting through them, but I knew if I did that I'd try to keep too many.  So, I tracked down two of my favorites (still dry), and I put the rest of them out for the garbage men to take.  As trivial as this seems, doing that tonight was harder than helping my parents move out of the house where I was raised.

Being a grown up sucks.