Clutter Your Life

Well, hopefully the insomnia isn’t back, but it’s about 4:30 AM, I’ve been up since about 3:45, and while I’ll probably crash and burn by 10, I’m wide awake now. So while the snowstorm blows and blusters outside I’m down in my snug little corner in the basement with my Alexa thingie sitting there on the shelf offering to show me how to make Chia Pudding (shudder) and telling me it’s going to snow all day and I want to talk about uncluttering of all things.

That’s what we’re supposed to be doing, aren’t we? Uncluttering. Especially us old farts. Instead of sitting around doing whatever it is us old people are supposed to be doing – maybe sewing our own shrouds and waiting to die or something I guess – we should be uncluttering.

Run that term through Google and you’ll come up with about a gazillion hits. “Ten Principles to Help Anyone Clear Clutter”. “10 Ways to Unclutter your Life”. “The Joy of Less”, “Unclutter and Unburden”. The basic premise is the same – we should be getting rid of all of the stuff we accumulate because it will be, somehow, “good for us”. The premise of all of them is that we don’t need all that – that stuff. We don’t need the books and the clothes and the magazines and the knicknacks and the dishes and the souvenir mug from Wall Drug and the pictures and everything else we own, and pare it down to just what we need to merely survive…

I suppose this trend has been driven, in part at least, by the occasional news story about hoarders and television shows about the nightmares discovered in the homes of hoarders. And the usual suspects have climbed on the band wagon to screech at you that if you have a single souvenir mug or refrigerator magnet or have a book you haven’t read in years, well, OMG you’re a hoarder and you’re sick and you need an “intervention” or something.

And if that doesn’t scare you into decluttering, they try to guilt you into it. “Just think of your family!” they whine. “They shouldn’t have to go through the pain of having to clear out all the stuff in your home after you’re dead! Think of the pain that will cause them!”

I normally don’t use language like this, but, well, fuck that. It’s BS. All of it. It’s like “mindfulness” or any of the other trends that seem like a good idea on the surface and have been quickly taken over by loonies and scammers and others out to make a quick buck. (Did you know there are books and classes out there to teach your dog “mindfulness”?)

Take a look at some of the “clutter” in my house.

There’s a battered, stained, beaten up looking Tom Swift Jr. book, part of a series of SF books written for kids back in the 1950s. It looks like it should have been tossed or recycled long ago. But that book is part of my life, my history, my memories. My mother would occasionally talk my father into abandoning the never ending chores associated with the farm long enough to go up to Green Bay, a major excursion for us back then. We’d stop at a department store that had a large book section, including a lot of kids’ books like Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and the Tom Swift books. I remember the trips, the store, stopping at Krolls afterwards for a hamburger… Interestingly, Krolls is still around and it’s right next door to the clinic MrsGF goes to for her knees and, amazingly enough, the hamburgers taste just as good now as they did 50 years ago or more

Hanging on a nail out in the garage is an old, battered cane made from white oak. It was my father’s, and his father’s before him. It was never used as a cane, it was used for sorting cattle. Every time I pick it up I remember walking into that barn, hearing the cows gently mooing at me in the hopes it was time to be fed, remember the smells, the warmth of the barn on a -30 degree winter day…

Back on my dresser is a statue of a dog, a collie. It isn’t anything special, probably didn’t cost very much. I should toss that too, according to the unclutter people. But my favorite uncle gave me that for Christmas when I was, oh, ten, eleven years old. He was a nice fellow. Gentle, kind, smart, successful. Every time I see it sitting there I think of him and my aunt, remember his voice, remember the times we visited.

No, I’m not going to “declutter”.

And I’m glad my mother and father didn’t before they passed on. Going through their things was a journey back in time, back through my childhood and even before I was born. My father apparently kept every receipt, every bill, every bit of paperwork concerning the farm that he ever got. Sorting through his papers after he died was an excursion into time, a trip into the past, a reminder of what life had been like going back almost to the time he bought the farm from his father.

We sorted through the toys of our childhood, even old homework that our mother had kept, old Christmas cards, ancient photos going back more than a hundred years. Going through all of that brought back a flood of memories that were full of joy and pain and sadness and surprise… It was difficult sometimes, yes, but it was an experience I also will always cherish as well.

We are human beings. Our brains work in funny ways sometimes. A smell, a sight, an object, can trigger memories so vivid that it is almost like we’re experiencing those events all over again. Objects, even silly, otherwise worthless things, become important to us, are even cherished by us, because they trigger those memories within us.

So if you tell me I need to “declutter”, I’m going to tell you to do something anatomically impossible to yourself because you’re telling me to erase my life, erase my memories, erase my past.