Get Rid of Stuff

Panic! Every time my husband said we—I—should get rid of stuff, I panicked. He said it often enough during our nearly forty years of marriage: when he peered into my workroom, opened the garage door, looked into a closet, or walked down the stairs to the basement. So, I would do a bit of organizing and tidying up, move a few things around, donate some items, and give a few away. Then I would stop. He started saying we have to get rid of stuff more frequently and insistently about three years before we planned to retire. At that time, the house we had owned for almost fifteen years had a tremendous amount of storage space. We had plenty of room for storage in a garage, a basement, bedrooms, and then in added storage space when we put an addition on the house. All that storage space was great—until it wasn’t. We stored things that we never used or did not need. Many things ended up out of sight and out of mind. I just liked—no, loved—to save things and didn’t want to throw out anything. I thought it might be useful someday, and there were sentimental and emotional attachments to things I could not part with back then. My parents were children during the Great Depression. Growing up, we saved everything. I told myself there were practical reasons for saving things. I would need them for potential arts and crafts projects, to fix something, and, of course, because it just might come in handy someday. I was always going to “get back into my art” and mend or restyle pieces of clothing so I wouldn’t need to buy new. This was how I rationalized saving everything from rubber bands and twist ties in jumbo zip-lock bags to spools with just a few lengths of thread, and stray beads. My husband led the way to downsizing by starting in our library. He sold, gifted, and donated a collection of more than 3,000 books. It took five years, but in the end, he proudly boasted that we only moved about a hundred of them. A job well done. This accomplishment inspired me. Originally, we dreamed of retirement on a Caribbean island—no more freezing temperatures and snow, just warm blue waters and sunny days. But a move there meant that practically everything we owned needed to go. The expense and the effort of shipping an entire household out of the country would have broken the bank. In addition, because of the climate, little or none of our classic colonial furniture would fare well and would not work with the open-air lifestyle we planned. Since we had some time, I began my downsizing prep for the moving journey very slowly and cautiously. I gradually picked up momentum on weekends and evenings after work as we got closer to our target move. Then after working toward finalizing a real estate deal for more than two years, it fell apart. We had to pull the plug and walk away. This gave me a welcome reprieve from downsizing and a much-needed extension on the move deadline. I now knew I could move more than the one suitcase my husband—tongue in cheek—kept telling me was my limit. Even with the change in plans there was still so much to get rid of before we could sell our home and make a retirement move. It became apparent we were finally ready to move into a smaller house with a smaller yard and garner benefits from reduced housing costs and the amount of personal time invested in upkeep. I just hated to trash anything that could be used or reused. So, I became more creative and dogged in finding homes for my long held and at one time cherished belongings.