Isolde's opinion of cleaning the playroom

this post is unfinished and still being edited.

My thanks to Thomasina.
    I would never help my sister clean out her future room, even if half of the stuff in it was mine.
   Well, I might take out my stuff, but not clean out two shelves of books (I think it was about 18 books in all) just before going on a school trip. I mean, I would be packing or looking up places on the internet so I could impress my friends with stuff about all the places that we'd be going to. But Tommy worked all day and would not let anyone help her. When she got back from her trip, she went straight to work. I admire the way she makes everything fun. I'd be putting away books and she would plug her MP3 player into the jambox and we would throw books at each other and sing along to the songs that would be playing and do a few dance moves to them as well. Those 4 days were a mixture of hatred for books and board games, and triumph at the end of the day when we had put all the books in the attic or had managed to drag a heavy bookshelf downstairs. At the end of each day I think we all heaved a sigh of relief and and smiled at our success.
     Our first step was to clean out the bookshelf and we did that in the first two days (we have a lot of books!). We put them all in the attic and put all our toys and games either in the attic or downstairs in our current bedroom, and that took up the second day. On the third, we cleaned the whole room except the huge wardrobe that now lay face down on the floor.
     We swept the floor and at the end of the day all traces that two kids once occupied that room were gone. We had played in that room for practically our whole lives. 9 years.  During that time we had learned how to read, write, draw, paint....

When we took apart our shelves and cleaned out our drawers, we found all the things we had made and done while we were growing up, we remembered playing with the toys that now were doing no more than collecting dust.

It was a time to remember...

a reminder of how much we had changed...

But the room itself had changed too....
Before 


After