Some years back when my parents made the sudden decision to leave their home of 40+ years and move into a retirement community, I asked Mom, "what about the house and all your stuff? What are you going to do about it?" She replied, "Oh, I thought you kids could figure that out for us."
"You kids" was pretty much me. As the eldest child, I had usually been the one called upon the pick up the mail and feed the birds when Mom and Dad went on vacation. Since for several years Jack and I lived just a block away from the folks, it did make sense. Even when we moved into another house, I was still the kid who was closest geographically, so I was the one called upon. So once they made the decision to move, I began spending several evenings a week going through the mountains of crap (and I use that term intentionally) that they had accumulated and held onto to try to get to the point where we could have an estate sale.
Although Dad had three storage buildings in the back yard, each with available space, he had lumber in the attic. Lumber. In the attic. Who does that? Also in the attic was a waterbed mattress from the 70s, a giant piece of stained glass that was in the front window of their long-ago studio, a box full of faded sales receipts from the studio (like a customer was gonna seek him out 30 years later about a refund?), and just plain junk. In one storage building were probably 60 or 70 individual cabinet doors. I think Dad used a few of them to cut up and build wall display units for their various collections of thimbles or whatever, but what the heck? How could he possibly need 60 cabinet doors?
There were three or four 4-drawer metal filing cabinets full of records, most of them unnecessary.
What I didn't find was family photographs. "Where are all the pictures of us when we were kids?" we asked Mom. "Oh, I threw most of them away. I scanned them into my computer where they didn't take up as much room."
You keep worthless sales receipts from the 80s but throw away sentimentally-priceless photographs from the 50s and 60s. Check.
When I first started the cleansing process I was worried that I might be setting up for a family version of Hoarders, but I was amazed to find that my folks let go of nearly everything extraneous without a fuss. They took the furniture and housewares they needed for the new place but let everything else go, to estate sale or trash as applicable. After months of dirty, exhausting effort at cleaning and clearing out, I swore to myself that I would never accumulate that much junk myself, would never do that to my children.
And today, more than six years later, I look around my house and see that I'm doing precisely that. I have enough fabric to open my own store -- and probably half of it is more than 10 years old. I don't make my daughters' clothes any more, and seldom make anything for myself. I work at a job where I see only family, never deal with the public, and can wear shorts and tees to work. So I don't need many nice blouses and skirts. Why am I keeping this fabric? There are two boxes labeled "Vintage Patterns," none of which I've looked at in years. And two big woven baskets of embroidered linens which I keep thinking I'll incorporate into dresses for my toddler granddaughters -- who only want to wear stuff that's sparkly and princess-like.
I have two drawers in my dresser that are basically junk drawers. Old pin-on buttons (Super Singer, We Support Our Troops-Come Home Soon [pretty sure that dates from Viet Nam days], Overworked and Underpaid, Native Texan, DISD Volunteer, and so on), mortarboard tassels from graduations, a decorative box from India, a Color Me Beautiful swatch book (if you've never had your colors done, I can't explain it), handkerchiefs: stuff, stuff, stuff.
An upstairs closet holds most of my collection of vintage clothes. Oh, I do have some wonderful things from the 40s and 50s, and I used to be able to fit into some of them and even wore them now and then. But that was years ago, and now they just hang there in the dark.
My bedroom closet holds other things with sentimental value: a tee shirt from my church choir (a church that dissolved in 1996), my grandmom's View Master, a tartan from my mom that features a plaid of one of our ancestor's lines, the shoes I wore to high school prom, a stuffed unicorn (definitely an 80s item)...Seriously, will my daughters care about any of those things when I'm gone? Absolutely not. If my house caught fire and I only had time to grab a few things as I escaped, would I grab those prom shoes? Absolutely not.
I've never been big on new year's resolutions. They sound good, they may make us feel good, but we all know that they usually fizzle pretty quickly, probably because we make them only because we think we're supposed to. But this year I want to make a mid-year resolution, and I'm going to try hard to keep it. I'm going to start paring down - tossing out, selling on eBay or donating to charity - a lot of the stuff that is strangling me and taking up too much space in my house and in my life.
Even though it's taken too many years to get me off dead center, I do realize that the things that are important to me are the things that evoke precious memories. My journals about my daughters. The letters Jack wrote me from college. Family photos. The outfits Jack's mom knitted for our girls when they were little. The quilt my Great-Aunt Sue made that includes fabrics I gave her.
I'm challenging myself to let go of at least some of the clutter. Let's see if I'm up to the challenge.
