Where Did It All Come From?

A few days ago I was talking to someone who said she had a big, rambling old house with lots of extra bedrooms and unused space now that the kids are all gone. She was thinking of downsizing. Except just thinking about it made her feel faint. All those extra rooms weren't empty. Technically, they weren't unused either. They were used for storage.

Many rooms were full to bursting with all the things a family of six accumulates. Plus the stuff inherited from both sets of parents that they never had time to sort through--pulling out the items with special memories or that might still be useful. Plus the things that broke or turned out not to do what they were supposed to, but couldn't simply be dumped in the trash. A lot of "deal with it later" things.

"Honestly," she said, "if a tornado blew through all those rooms, I'm not sure we'd miss anything."

"So?" I asked thoughtlessly.

"So that doesn't mean we can just toss it all. I know that something truly valuable would be lost. We have to go through it all. And I just don't have the emotional energy for that right now!"

I've already discussed the clutter situation of our home and I won't revisit that now. But it did make me ponder how our homes get to be this way.

My parents didn't have this problem. They were too organized and could be quite unsentimental. When they moved to their retirement home they did have to clean out an eight-room house. But they went about it very efficiently. And gave a lot to my brother and me.

When they moved they had boxes and boxes of photographs. My dad loved to take pictures. So they made up an album for each of us with highlights from our childhood. It was great and my girls enjoyed looking through it. But then one day they showed up with a large box of photos ... all the ones that hadn't gone in the album. After all, you can't just toss a perfectly good photo. This was overkill.

I haven't compared notes with my brother on this, but I was given a lot of goodies, a few of which I displayed. The rest got stuck in the basement until both of them had passed away. Then it was gone. It didn't mean anything to us or their grandkids.

I will confess that we kept all the photos. Turns out they are hard to get rid of. They are little glimpses of history--fashion, home decorating, and how and where we spent our time.

Despite their good habits, the house they had retired to twenty-four years earlier was stuffed when my mom passed away. Cleaning out her home was a minor nightmare. Selling her house was a major nightmare. When it was all over my husband said, "What can we do to make sure that whoever ends up as our executrix won't have to go through this?"

I can't imagine us ever having the time to get this house, or our lives in general, as organized as we would like. My only answer was, and is, "We don't die."

It's a plan and I'm sticking to it.