Time to let go?

Slime.

I HATE slime. I’ve hated it since the first time my kids brought it home from some party years ago. It’s messy and nasty and always seems to find a way to ruin things.

Every time I found a new batch of slime somewhere hidden (my kids knew my hatred of the stuff!), it would be thrown away.

As my kids grew up, I was grateful that I had made it through those horrible slime years. Thank goodness that’s behind me!

Well—my gratitude came too quickly.

I was putting some things away Saturday night and my eyes glanced down to the box of old wooden train tracks. They looked…sparkly? I kneeled down and saw that the pieces were covered in hardened slime. Hardened doesn’t seem to describe this substance—more like petrified slime.

I sat, dumbfounded.

I marched downstairs, holding a slime-ified track and looking at my kids, questioningly. Yep, one of them had brought slime home…AGAIN! Yes, it fell from the shelf and spilled into the box of trains, coating the pieces and some of my fondest memories with unforgiving goo.

What should I do? Should I throw the whole box away? Truthfully, my kids have outgrown the trains. And yet I couldn’t let them go. I decided to clean off the slime, instead.

At first, I thought I could scrape it off with a knife. NOPE. This slime is petrified, remember? Heat it with a blow dryer? That did nothing except burn my fingers. Google says to use baking soda and vinegar, but I am wary. Are the tracks worth a science experiment that will occupy the majority of my time and turn my house into a messy laboratory?? And would I be cleaning them just so they can sit in a box again?

Sigh.

Maybe it is time to let go?

I really loved the trains. We set up so many train tracks over the past twenty years. It feels like I’d be throwing away more than the trains—I’d be throwing away part of my life and memories, too.

But that’s not true.

Things are just things. Usually, they are with us for a while, not forever. In contrast, the memories we make and the relationships we build are the parts of life that last—the parts without an expiration date, things that cannot be spoiled by slime.

It is probably time to let go.