On Clutter’s Cutting Edge

March 24, 2016

There’s my mother again. On the left she’s wearing her snappy sunglasses circa 1940. On the right, it’s the 1950s and she’s on our first dock at the cottage. Smokin’ ‘n fishin’. I found these in a stack of family photos…at the bottom of a huge Wal-Mart storage container…in my late sister’s jam cupboard…that used to contain my family’s individual ashes…including my sister’s cat George. (See November 2014 – “November 1 — the Day of the Dead. Family Humour seems appropriate here.”) I’m downsizing. No. I’m trying to downsize.

My husband says I’ve got too much stuff. I’ve known that for ages. After all, I am the person who stumbles around curating it all. Secretly, I’ve been pitching and giving away treasures (books) and clothing for over a year. I can almost get my clothes into one cupboard. Maybe two. It is now possible to clear the kitchen counter and the table, and even sit in the chairs – given enough notice.

The cookbooks still bulge from a sideboard also stuffed with tablecloths. Cookbooks with sentimental value are at the bottom of my “Computer Stuff” antique cabinet left to me by…oh, never mind. The rest of the cookbooks are wedged into a kitchen cupboard. Most of my sister and mother’s tchotchkes are gone. The phrase, “Well, I didn’t chose them,” helped.

But it’s become obvious how much guilt my mother was able to instil. “Ahh, my gramma’s milk pitcher with the parrot drawing. Gramma sat that pitcher on the table every morning. Sigh.” How could I now throw that jug of sighs out?

But wait. Let’s be clear here. My mother was abandoned by her mother Margaret, and raised by a mean old lady (Margaret’s mother) during the Depression. My mother said absolutely nothing good about her mother or her grandmother. “Some women should never have had children,” is what she did say. So I don’t know how I became the primary downsizer? Maybe my mother was trying to make a childhood for herself by saving these souvenirs.

Anyone want a toothpick holder showing Victoria St. in Alliston, Ontario where my mother was sent to visit during summers? The picture on it is a bit blurry, but it’s definitely the building currently housing the “Fast Cash” store on Alliston’s main drag. If I get rid of the gold-trimmed toothpick holder, now elevated to historical artefact, I’ll be hit by a bolt of lightening.

For 13 years, I’ve been storing my sister’s eclectic bits of china. My mother-in-law, Joy, came from a more prosperous background than ours. That’s why I have pieces of silver sitting around in all their tarnished glory. I wasn’t born to polish silver, or iron linens and no one else wants to either. You can’t sell the stuff. Or give it away.

Joy, has been able to guilt me from the grave. I still have her lace treasures. Why? She left hand written notes full of implied sighs.

This isn’t downsizing. Or even making things tidy like that woman proselytizing in her horrible book, “The life-changing magic of tidying up.” The author is a Tidy-Nazi with a hard-core, humourless approach to a highly emotional job that you must break into stages. With even bigger breaks in-between.

And why do non-cooks ask why I have so many frying pans, pots, knives and obscure kitchen tools? Well after 50 years of cooking and collecting, I have a working kitchen that gives me pleasure. Why would I want to get rid of any of it? Downsizing is the slippery slope to eating mush in an institution. They are not Homes.

My eureka moment. I held a garden party for my women friends. It was also a fundraiser for Nicole Brooks’ Vision — Obeah Opera. And a Jolly Way to get rid of some expensive, fragile china.

The woman in the white dress singing in the left picture, conceived, wrote, composed and produced the whole Opera that she also stars in. No surprise. Nicole Brooks. I can’t say no to her. Nicole commented on my apron. I gave it to her. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The garden party was the perfect place for all those wrinkled linens and lace, and my mother’s gilded dainty tea-cups. I used them to serve dynamite gin punch and extract even more donations than expected. We had a great time but unfortunately nothing broke so I was still stuck with it…all. What then?

It was such a raucous good time tea party that my daughter, Maeve, decided to use the same theme for a bridal shower she’s throwing. I’ve packed up the party supplies, and have lined up more boxes in the hall near the door. They’re full of Joy’s crystal and china left to Maeve. Everything can go to her house. I’ll even deliver it.

And after her party, it can all go wherever Maeve wants it to go. But not back here.

***

After reading the article at the following link, I’ve decided to get out of the downsizing business. It’s nothing more than a fad, a social pressure and I refuse to give in to it any longer. Being called a Hoarder is the other social pressure. No one wants to be called a hoarder. I don’t hoard. That was my sister.

My clutter is a small collection of treasures to jog my memory, bring on a smile, sometimes a frown or a tear, and prompt me to think things out by writing about them. I still put stuff I don’t like or want in a box out on the sidewalk on sunny mornings. By noon, every thing is gone. The sidewalk is a beach with the tide coming in and taking out all that personal history…except the photographs. How do you get rid of the photos? Especially when they’re your only link? Just think – if I hadn’t kept the pictures, I wouldn’t have those opening snapshots to set me off.

With a big thank you to Chloe McCloskey who knew I would love this New York Times’ article