13 Things Mexican Mothers Remove After 50 (That Americans Never Throw Away)

Get The Old Mexican Way, every old way written down: https://oldmexicanway.com You were on the third step of the ladder on Saturday, reaching for the big pot on top of the cabinets, and the ladder moved. Only an inch. Ten years ago you would not have thought about it. On Saturday you thought about your hip. I told you no se tira nada, nothing gets thrown away, and I meant every word. There is a second half your grandmother knew and nobody wrote down. These thirteen things do not go in the trash. They LEAVE: to a person, to the church, to the rag bag. Keeping everything was never the law. Nothing wasted was the law. And a thing on a high shelf for fifteen years, used by no one, is the most wasted thing in your house. None of it is your fault. Every one came into your house honestly. THE THIRTEEN (what it is, why after 50, and where it goes): 1️⃣ The good dishes saved for a day that is not coming. After 50, you are the occasion. Use them on a Wednesday, or give them to your daughter now, while you can watch her use them. 2️⃣ The clothes waiting for a body from 1998. Good garments go as gifts to the comadre whose size they are, or to la segunda. Finished house clothes go to the rag drawer. Nothing goes in a black bag: the black bag is where decisions go to hide. 3️⃣ The tall ladder, and everything it was for. After 50 a fall is a hip, not a bruise. The ladder lives at your son's house now, and everything above your shoulders comes down. Borrow the ladder. 4️⃣ The little rugs and the cords across the floor. A cord in one place for two years means you need an outlet, and it never goes under a rug. Walk the path to the bathroom tonight in your socks with the light off. 5️⃣ The duplicates. Four can openers, eleven wooden spoons, twenty-two towels for two people. Keep the one that works and the one you love. The rest is a granddaughter's first kitchen, or the church hall. 6️⃣ The bottles under the sink and on the garage shelf. They break down, grandchildren open cabinets, and nobody will know what they are. Never down the drain, never poured together. Your county has a free day for this. 7️⃣ The old medicines, in the wrong room. Medicines want cool and dry, not the bathroom. The old ones go to the pharmacy counter, never the trash and never the toilet. 8️⃣ The big pot, given WITH the lesson. Do not leave them a pot. Leave them a woman who knows how to use it. 9️⃣ The papers. Keep your mother's handwriting. Shred the old statements. Make one tin, with one page at the front that says what is in it and where everything else lives. 🔟 The things that were too nice to use. Cream separates, perfume turns, cloth breaks along the fold. Use it on a Tuesday. The drawer was the waste. 1️⃣1️⃣ The boxes you are keeping for your grown children. Give them a date, and give them lunch. A mother is not a warehouse. 1️⃣2️⃣ The shoes you can no longer walk in. If you would not wear them across a wet parking lot, they go to the niece. 1️⃣3️⃣ Not an object: the word SOMEDAY. My mother's rule: a thing that stopped working left that week, not that year, as a gift, with its fault named honestly. The second half of no se tira nada: nothing is thrown away, and nothing is kept past its use. Who profits from every year you wait: the $200 storage unit, the bins every January, and the hard one, the $600 dumpster or the estate company that keeps forty cents of every dollar, when your children empty the house in one weekend and the blue bowl is just a bowl. This is not about dying. It is about being the one who decides, while you can still tell the story that goes with each thing. Tonight, do one: one shelf above your shoulders. Bring it all down to the table, with somebody holding the ladder, for the last time. For each thing, say a name out loud. Then make one phone call. Tell me the one thing you cannot let go of, and who it should go to, and your county or state. I read every one. I am not a doctor. Nothing here is medical advice. For any medicine, ask your pharmacist.