One man's trash is Gigi's treasure.

A friend of mine IM'ed me last night about the ordeal that has been moving her mother out of her home and in with my friend and her husband. She gave me a heads up that when I reach that life stage, I should prepare for the fact elderly people don't like throwing things away. They start seeing everything as keepsakes and memories.

I was quite happy to say I'd already learned this lesson a couple of years ago when we moved my grandmother out of her home. But in my grandmother's case, everything aligned to create the perfect storm of the most useless crap imaginable. First, her home was quite large, thus there was plenty of room to store plenty of junk. Second, my grandmother is in her eighties, so she's definitely at the everything's-a-keepsake stage. But what really made all this the perfect storm is that my mother's side of the family (my mother strangely excluded) has an inability to recognize what is trash. It's like a severely mutated form of the packrat gene.

So it was no surprise that my grandmother came to me last year with two treasures she thought I might like. The first were little plastic cake toppers (a clown, a little girl, etc.) that by the looks of them, had been on someone's cake in...1976, maybe?

"Gigi, what are these."

"Oh, well, I thought you might know someone that would like these."

"I'm pretty sure the trash can would like them."

"Ohhhhh, no!" she cried, "They're so cute! Maybe James or Catherine would like to have them?"

James and Catherine are my youngest siblings, and both are teenagers. I was fairly certain they would rather have, oh I don't know, an iPod over cake toppers from the 1970s. But I appreciated the gesture so took them and told her I'd check and see. She then proceeded to give me a bottle of Breck shampoo, that was probably retired the same day the cake toppers were. It was half full, and what was in there had separated out into different layers. I was familiar with this phenomenon with salad dressings, but was concerned to see the same thing happens to shampoo with enough time. In an attempt to see if the layers would actually mix, I turned the bottle upside down. The shampoo barely moved, and I was shocked to see the layers actually stayed in tact.

"And what, exactly, am I supposed to do with this?" I asked, watching the shampoo carefully.

"Well, it's shampoo, silly. We shouldn't just let it go to waste."

"If I put this in my hair, it most definitely won't clean it. In fact, I'm fairly certain it will preserve it, like sap does with insects."

After realizing the shampoo had moved about a centimeter in the time I'd had it upside down, she finally resigned it might be time to throw the shampoo away.

It would be easy to blame both of these gifts on the nostalgia of the elderly. But again, this isn't really a new thing for her, or anyone related to my mother. The summer after my freshman year of college, I lived with my grandparents. One morning, I was having a quiet cup of coffee with them. My grandmother was putzing around and suddenly said, "Honey, do you know what I found in the freezer yesterday?"

"What's that?" my grandfather responded.

"A turkey."

"A turkey?"

"Yes. Isn't that strange? I guess it was one Robert gave us for Christmas."

"Ah, yup. Bet that's it."

As it was July, I was somewhat horrified they had a turkey in their freezer leftover from Christmas. But before I could settle into this idea, my grandfather said, "Honey, how long has Robert been dead?"

Needless to say, I spewed my coffee across the table. "How long has Robert been dead??" I shrieked.

"Well, I really can't remember," my grandfather responded, clearly perplexed.

"You have a TURKEY in your freezer, that was given to you by a man that's been dead so long you can't even REMEMBER how long it's been?!?"

"Oh. Well, I guess that is a good point. Honey, maybe we should throw that out."

"MAYBE?!?"

Given the situation with the Breck, I guess I'm just happy they didn't eat it.