There are some things you have to keep

I am between rehab projects and out of $ so I decided this would be the perfect time to redo the basement and last two un-remodeled rooms in the house.  One used to be my son's bedroom and the other is my working office.  Both are filled with ridiculous amounts of stuff, some useful and most not.  Cleaning it out is tougher than I thought.

The first, and most obvious, plan was to just toss out anything I don't use.  Since I haven't used almost any of it in a couple of years I that would take care of it.  As a bonus, we live on a well-traveled road so instead of contributing to the landfill, I was able to just set things out by my driveway and they'd magically disappear.

But there are some things that I will never use and, if I'm totally honest, don't even like, but I am stuck with for the rest of my life.  My challenge is figuring out what to do with them.

For example, the geese.  My mother-in-law made these origami geese, complete with goose stand (maybe it's an origami nest?) out of magazine pages and gave me several of them on one of our visits to Okinawa.  They're really cool in the sense of "wow!  I had no idea you could do that with magazine paper!" but in a purely aesthetic sense, I'd rate them as moderately hideous.

So the question becomes, what do I do with these?  I can't throw them away because she made them, and to make the guilt even worse, she recently passed away.  I can't pawn them off on the kids because they already have some.  I can't display them in my house because...well, technically I could display them in my house but I really don't want to.  So I'll keep them and bequeath them to my kids in my will and then they will be stuck with them because Grandma made them and they knew Grandma and, well, she made them. I figure they can bequeath them to their kids, too, and so on until we either hit a generation that isn't sentimental about them or magazine paper becomes so rare that they are considered priceless works of art and sold for millions.

They look even worse in pictures than they do in my head.

Then there's the other thing.  I don't even know what to call it.  My husband got it in Okinawa from his karate teacher's wife, a woman who was like a second mother to him.  She made it and wanted him to give it to me.  Or so he says.  I sent her a purse so I suspect she felt a need to reciprocate and as she was scanning the room the first thing her eyes fell on was this creation.  He says she felt he and his American wife needed one of these.  Which is why his friend didn't get one.  Because his wife is Okinawan.  I think that's racist.

This object is a display for the Doll Festival, or Girls Day.  It has tiny figures made from q-tips and colored paper arranged to look like they are having some kind of ceremony on top of a festively-decorated shoe box.  The dolls are supposed to harbor bad spirits and originally part of the festival was sending similar doll displays down the river or into the ocean to take the badness with them.

I've looked this festival up on Wikipedia and this thing does, indeed, look much like a mini version of the traditional doll display.  It's bright red and made out of a shoebox, paper, and q-tips, all covered with cellophane that is uncleanable and has collected about a half inch of dust .  I think it's the q-tips that are the deal-breaker for me,  and even though I do look at it and think, "wow!  what a creative thing to do with colored paper and q-tips!" right after that I think, "I wonder if this was a craft project at the senior care center."

My husband was really excited about this thing.  He called me all the way from Okinawa just to tell me he was bringing it home for me.  And he reports that when his sisters saw it they expressed envy and wished they could have it.  I was getting pretty excited about it too until I saw it.  And then I really wished he'd left it with my sister-in-law because I knew that unlike me, she could truly appreciate it.

But again, this woman, who is a very important part of my husband's history, made it.  I can't throw it out.

I couldn't get a good picture through the layer of dust

I think I've found a solution, though.  Before we redid our kitchen we had a bulkhead going across 3 walls. We tore it out and put in really tall replacement cabinets.  The top shelves of those cabinets don't get a lot of use, so I can put the geese and the q-tip display on the top shelve in the cabinet I use for spices and cooking stuff.  This way they'll be protected and mostly invisible, yet I'll see them every day when I cook and think of my mom-in-law and husband's teacher's wife.

Craft project gifts are not limited to the Japanese side of my family.  My American family is just as creative and well-meaning.  I have a ceramic gnome, lovingly painted by my grandmother, that matches nothing in my home in either color or context, but that will always have a place there.  Not necessarily a visible place, but a place nonetheless. It's current place is a spot on the dresser in the guest room.  Hopefully our future guests don't get freaked out by gnomes staring at them while they sleep.  or by gnomes sitting in the middle of what is mostly Asian art.

My father-in-law made the hat - but I think it's pretty cool.  And my
son wore it all the way home from Japan when he was 7.

But I'm as guilty as they are, I suppose.  People all over the country have been gifted with my handmade pottery chip'n'dips.  And my really good friend has a set of 4 bowls I made for her which she likes to praise as "really heavy", apparently not realizing that's not actually a compliment in the pottery world.  I think she keeps them because I made them for her.

A chip-n-dip