If I were to be honest, I don't really understand people who are enthralled with decluttering mavens. My first apartment had lots of space and I didn't have to worry much about measuring before I acquired something new. In sharp contrast, the first house I owned, right after that, was very small square footage and out in the country. I had to part with most of my furniture from my first apartment to my first home ownership experience. In a small square footage house each piece of furniture and its scale had to be carefully considered before acquiring it and bringing it home. It took a while but I became very good at selecting small items and keeping everything in its place. Once we had small children, even with an addition to my small house, the house was too small. We sold it and moved to another state to a house that was larger, but not large. Then, every few years we sold and moved up to a larger home each time, but also we put more money down each time in an attempt to get closer to being debt free.
In most of these houses, everything was organized and I either didn't have the space or the time for clutter. Most things had an assigned space, and most of the time things were in it. Eventually, with five children in total, we had a lot of things. The last two homes we have had, we built, and the last one has outbuildings we added. Now, we have a lot of things. However, I am still not racing to declutter.
Some people feel liberated when they part even with most of the things they have. These are the people to which the decluttering mavens are speaking. I am not one of these people. I have worked very hard to select and to acquire the items that are in my home. I don't acquire things on a whim. If I don't really like it, or it doesn't have a memory attached to the item, then it's not there in the first place. I also don't feel particularly happy if I donate something to Goodwill, and then find in two weeks that I or someone I know really needed it after all. See, I have a better memory than most people. I still remember the lovely bronze towel racks I planned to put in my first house in the 1980s. Then I found that they didn't really fit there. Rather than taking them with me on the out of state move to see if they worked in the new house, I sold them. I have regretted that sale in every house I have been since, but most of all when my daughter bought her own house, as a twenty-something and those bronze towel racks would have worked beautifully in either one of her bathrooms!
I also have the memory of having bought a beautiful wrought iron carriage lamp at a garage sale in the 1980s before moving from that first house. I had no idea where I would use it, but it was perfect, beautiful, and had been rewired. I knew that if I held onto it, that someday I would find a perfect place for it. It took until 2006, but when we had a large barn built, with fencing around it, and I needed a glorious lamp outside a particular door, and it was perfect. From 1986 to 2006, it sat wrapped in sponge and bubble wrap, being unwrapped periodically each time we moved. Each time, I chose to hold on to it.
Decluttering mavens tell us that if you haven't used it in six months that you should get rid of it. I am certainly glad I didn't get rid of my alpaca scale (for crias, or baby alpacas), my incubator for chicken, guinea or grouse eggs. I am glad I still have the incandescent light set designed to keep young or sick birds warm. I am glad that I still have Elizabethan collars for every dog size, and collars and leashes as well. I have a fair amount of horse gear in the tack room, and I plan to hold on to it. We should part with the items we wish to sell or donate, and we should hold on and make appropriate accomodations for the items we truly wish to keep. I don't need someone telling me which items those are.
There are some specific decluttering challenges which come to us. My youngest son died in 2008, and for the longest time I held on to everything that he had loved. It was almost as if I felt as if he returned he would be unhappy that I had parted with it. It took a long time before I was able to part with things so that others would enjoy as much as he did. Finally, as time passed I was able to part with his things. I still kept a core of things that held special memories of him for our family. I also experienced the challenge of both of my parents passing away within a year of one another. They had been divorced when I was an adult, and so there had been time for them to establish their own residences and acquire full households. I sold or donated most things because they were each in other areas than I. Eventually, I decided I was sufficiently grief stricken that I should place the remaining items in storage, and then review and sell or donate these items when it wasn't such an emotional hardship to do so. Honestly, I have been pawing through this stuff for years. However, I am glad I did. When my daughter bought her home, she actually selected some of the antique furniture that my mother, and then my father had. Some of those items will remain in the family. It also gave me time to consign some of the items and to actually locate some things I thought may have been lost.
Although it's true that things are simply things, sometimes they mean more than that. My mother's antique copper pots and teapot sat on a shelf in every house I remember. They now sit on a shelf in my own country kitchen. Some of her Wedgewood jasperware collection sits with mine. My Dad's thousands of pages of correspondence to family, friends and some notables, was very helpful to me when I wrote a book on him which was released in 2017. Things are simply things, however they were made by materials left here on Earth by God, and then lovingly turned into a memory by people. Stuff is not the problem. Recognizing the intrinsic value of the items you have and then deciding how best to honor those items can be. I know that everything cannot be kept. I realize that if my baby granddaughter does not love dolls, that my dolls are going to eventually need to find a loving home. The ultimate disposal of the items I have loved is up to me, not to a decluttering maven. Sorry, Marie Kondo. I will be doing it all myself, and I won't be made to feel guilty as I enjoy the memories as one by one, I dust, package and find new homes or even a museum or two for my father's books.
