You’ve got to calm yourself. We are only a few days in and there are weeks to go. I understand your excitement, but you must pace yourself. And remember: this is not a joyous affair.

It’s hard for any of us to concentrate during spring cleanup week.

It happens every year. Spring cleanup sends me off on flights of fancy. For melancholy is that time of year when a person must decide what in his life has value and what is no longer relevant. Sad and shabby are the castaways of lives that have moved on. The imagination runs amok.

Piled high along streets for blocks and blocks, once treasured items sit askew and unwanted in heaps. Long serving furniture and faithful relics will be left without sentiment to await their demise. Lonely is the end of things that have been replaced.

There is the couch on which the young couple shared their first kiss and conceived their first child. The upholstery is faded now and springs have popped through in places. The couple is no longer in love and the memory of their time on that lumpy sofa is no longer cherished. Couch and memories alike are set on the curb like things unworthy of keeping.

There is the gigantic Zenith on which the old man watched the Red Sox during the miraculous 2004 season. It’s the same set on which he tuned into “Law & Order” episodes late at night when he got to reflecting too much and couldn’t sleep.

The old man is in an elderly housing facility now, and the people who pass for his kin see no value in the monstrous throwback. The television was once the aging man’s only friend and now it sits half buried in junk on the side of Bartlett Street.

Here is a decrepit desk on which a young man studied through his teen years. For a decade worth of nights, he sat at the battered desk doing homework and scratching the initials of his current girlfriend into the wood.

Now the kid is a young man and he has moved away to college. You don’t impress your frat brothers with such an ungainly piece of furniture, and so to the curb it goes. The desk carried the boy through a thousand homework assignments and a million daydreams. Now it has broken legs and it sits on the tar waiting to be crushed in the rubbish truck.

There is a box filled with soggy stuffed animals that once comforted a timid young girl through the worst of her night terrors. There is a teddy bear with a missing eye. There is what looks like an elephant in the colors of a rainbow. There is a smiling mouse that used to giggle when you pressed on his belly.

The girl is older now and her parents believe it is best that they cast away childish things. Late at night, the girl will peer from her bedroom window at her old friends on the street staring forlornly at the sky from their glass or button eyes. She imagines that her beloved old toys cry and wonder what they did to deserve this fate.

There is a twisted bird cage that used to house a pair of finches named Bonnie and Clyde. The birds were the most prized possessions of a lonely old woman who spoke to them as though they were children. She awoke to the sounds of their happy chirping each morning and then rushed in her robe to their cage. Bonnie and Clyde made the old woman’s final years peaceful and alas, she died.

The birds were shipped to the pet store upon her death and crammed into a larger cage filled with bigger, meaner birds. They lived each moment in horror and missed the old woman’s voice. The cage in which they once resided was bent and crushed under the weight of more hefty debris.

Somewhere among the mounds of disposable memories is a manual typewriter with hopelessly sticking keys. A shy young man once used the relic to pen eloquent love letters and flowery poems to a pretty girl who never returned his affection. His last written work was a suicide note.

There on the corner is a scarred kitchen table that abided through countless family meals. It is the table that sat silently through family squabbles and faithfully through holiday feasts. It’s the same table over which mother and father cried when their firstborn was killed in the war. It is the same table on which they pounded their fists when the youngest met his fate in a car wreck.

As if blamed for the tragedies, the table has been broken down into fragments and heaped atop the rest of the detritus outside. It has been replaced by a shiny, new table that will perhaps bring the dwindling family better fortune.

Here, there and everywhere, memories and dashed dreams are swept to the curb.

A rolled up carpet on which a toddler took his first steps. A dented, footless rocking horse a young boy used to ride into fantasy while his parents screamed and fought in the room next door. An ancient but sturdy barbecue on which a thousand steaks and burgers were grilled before the divorce, and all the ugliness that followed.

For some, it’s sonnets and sad songs that get their thoughts to stirring. For me, it’s the remnants at the side of the road, with all their unspoken stories. The couches and chairs, beds and mirrors that stood as props while human drama played around them. Mounds and mounds of memories that have been thrust outside, like unloved exiles who have been cast out of the kingdom.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.