Clutter

I had been married for three years when I moved into my present house with my meager possessions three decades ago. Over the years, my wife and I have kept the economy going by purchasing things we thought we needed at the time. In retrospect, we didn’t need nearly half the things we purchased, but that’s another story. The incoming items became part of our physical possessions, just as much as the house itself. A number of years ago we lost our attic storage space when we expanded the living area. As a result, the bedrooms and basement have become quite cluttered.

As is usually he case in most homes, each year we take in more than we get rid of. Thus, since the laws of physics have not changed, we have more and more things to store in the same amount of space. Our storage has even expanded to the garage, effectively dispossessing two cars in the process. The only hope, other than renting a dumpster or tossing things out willy-nilly, is to selectively go through our possessions little by little, getting rid of anything we no longer need, while at the same time, making a concerted attempt to bring fewer things into the house.

I have identified two large sources of the clutter: old magazines and childhood papers/mementos. Over the years I subscribed to a number of weekly and monthly periodicals, which began to pile up when work and other activities did not permit much time for leisure reading. Since I also had a phobia about tossing unread magazines, each publication began to pile up at a rate of about 50 or so a year. This, combined with the monthly publications, created quite a pile. I did my best to sort and stack them, turning every other issue 180 degrees to make the pile more stable. But I was afraid to toss any of them without turning each page for fear of missing something important. I call this fear magazineaphobia.

Now, however, the time has come when I realize I will never catch up to these old issues. So I’ve developed a plan to grab about ten magazines a day, go through them quickly, page by page, tearing out articles of interest. This method reduces the pile greatly, adds to my recycling total and not surprisingly, uncovers a few very interesting articles, which when viewed with 20-20 hindsight vision, are truly eye-opening.

Someone once wrote that life could only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Reading ten year old articles gives you a true sense of history.

At the rate I’m going through these old magazines, it will be quite some time before I’m up to date. But at least it’s a start.

The second clutter culprit is my penchant for saving everything from my children’s childhood. I suspect that is because there is so little remaining from my own childhood and because I watched too many episodes of Antiques Roadshow, which taught me that a collectible was much more valuable if one had the original box it came in. So while my baseball cards and comic books were tossed by my parents even before I moved out of the house, I was determined to keep every scrap of paper my children wrote or drew on and every box their toys came in. I figured that when they got to be close to my age, they would appreciate having something they had as a child. But I now understand how parents feel about things when their children grow up.

Somewhere I have an article I clipped from a Sunday New York Times about the day the Barbie dolls left the house. Ours never did. My daughters haven’t played with Barbie dolls in almost 20 years, but I still have them and their accessories somewhere in my basement. Why? I’m beginning to understand how my mother could throw out a shoebox filled with baseball cards – she could not foresee the value of them in years to come. And I’m beginning to wonder if the Cabbage Patch dolls that we scoured the city to find for our children will ever have any value. Time marches on and those Cabbage Patch Kids may be about to march out the door.

Right after the last of the magazines.