Kitchen towels: Day 2

"One cannot have too many dish towels, can they?" That seems to be the general feeling when it comes to these little necessities. I mean, how often do you find yourself wiping your hands on one, drying off a bowl with another and needing one more to soak up a spill? They don't need to look pretty to do the job either, because the job they do is often not a pretty one. So why would I be getting rid of a significant portion of my collection?
I feel slightly uncomfortable discussing this for fear that some reader will think me wasteful and overly particular. Still, the truth is the truth. I got rid of a whole pile of kitchen towels. I had too many to fit in my wooden boxes that I store them in. When I would take out one towel, three others would pop out with it. This over-stuffing caused the dishtowels to be in perpetual disarray. I also didn't really like a lot of them. I have this irrational distaste for terry cloth dish towels with cute designs printed on them. They don't bother me in other people's kitchens, but I don't prefer them in mine. On the other hand, there are certain dishtowels that make me smile just to see them hanging neatly on the oven door handle. Especially my over-sized flour sack dish drying towels. It is pure joy to hang these crisp white cotton squares on the line while the breeze flutters between them and they glow with the brightness of clean sunlight. The plaid towels and the knobby textured red towel add texture to whatever task is at hand. The woven towels, with their green through red and their pink on pink seem so classic, so kitchen chic.  
So I went though the drawer boxes that were full of towels and rags shoved in at various stages of folding and unfolding. I separated them into three piles; keep, give away and trash.
"But," you protest "you should keep them for rags." I thought about that, half of these dishtowels are only a few washes away from becoming rags themselves. When I need a rag, I will simply choose one of those "near rags".
My ambivalence regarding this decision prompted me to take pictures only of my remaining kitchen towels instead of the discarded ones. This was because someone reading this post may have given one of them to me, or that they may have had some sentimental value to someone at some time of which I was not hitherto aware.

Who knew that there could be so much fear and guilt associated with the purging of a pile of stained and thread bare kitchen towels?