Green Towels

Recently I unpacked a box of towels. To be specific, one of our boxes of towels. Imagine my surprise while packing to discover that all of our towels don't fit into one moving box. We seem to have a lot of towels.

Now, I don't know how many towels the average family has. And I haven't counted ours to know how many we actually have. But we have the towels we got as wedding presents from our registry, the towels we got as wedding presents that weren't on our registry, the towels Staffan had before we were married, and the towels I had before we were married. Then of course there are other categories of towels, like beach towels and baby hooded towels, and so forth.

The overwhelming majority of our towels are blue. We registered for different shade of blue towels when we got married. The towels Staffan had before we were married were also blue. The towels that I had before we were married were green. I only had a few. After all, how many towels does one person need? You use one for a week or so, throw it in the laundry, and assuming you do laundry about once a week, the first towel is back when it's time to wash the second one. By this logic, it's reasonable to have about 3 towels per person... in case laundry gets delayed or you want to pack a clean one for a trip or something like that. Add a few extras for when guests come, and it seems reasonable for our family of 3 to have no more than 15 towels.

As I was unpacking all these towels and realizing we have more than we need, I decided it was time to get rid of a few towels. The most obvious candidates were the green ones that don't match any of the others. We never even use them because they don't match. So I set them aside and started putting the assorted blue towels in the linen closet. And yet, the whole time, I keep looking at this small pile of green towels. It's bothering me that they're sitting there. They're still in great shape. What difference does it make what color they are if they get you dry? Guest towels don't have to match the bathroom, and maybe a different color makes it easier to tell whose is whose. By the time the blue towels were stacked in the closet, I was rearranging to create more space and in went the green towels too.

What a small step in the right direction it would've been to give away 4 towels that we never use. And yet there they sit right this moment in my linen closet. Like they've done for the past 9 years, occasionally coming out to take up space in a moving box to be moved to a new linen closet. So why does it bother me so much to give them away?