Every
time my ex-husband and I moved, I learned to clean house and sell or give away
things I did not want to pack and move to the next house.
The two
times I got divorced it was easy to get rid of the ex’s junk. Without his clothes,
his collections, and his tools out in the garage, it left lots of room for my
stuff. It also gave me permission to replace
all his man cave junk with nice decorations.
When I
married HoneyBunch and we had to combine two households, I cut all my
possessions in half by offering things to my three kids. They were just starting their own homes, so some
took furniture; others took household items. I had a monster of a garage sale
and called the Disabled Vets to come get the rest. Even like that HB and I had
doubles of too many things and so the downsizing continued for a year after we
married.
We still
have two dining tables, two sets of “grandma’s china,” and two truckloads of
Christmas decorations that neither one of us will surrender.
As an
educator for thirty-seven years, I had boxes and boxes of books and teaching
materials, stuff I carted home every summer and stored until the beginning of
school the next fall. Stuff I needed for
reference or to decorate sterile classrooms year after year. When I retired I gave away twenty boxes
jammed with expensive books to the school district in which we live and I threw
away/recycled bins and bins of paper, but here I am, seven years later and
still trying to use up the dozens of pencils and pens, sticky notes and glue,
folders and reams of paper I bought on sale way back then.
The same
thing happened when I decided to reduce the number of books in my house by half. I gave books away, sold some, and then
donated the rest to our local library, but still here we go again. Time to downsize again.
HoneyBunch
and I have decided that as we grow older, we need to have some say about what
happens to our “treasures.” We shouldn’t wait until we have to downsize and have no options because of time restraints. We
don’t want to leave too much of a mess for our kids after we are gone. We know
that most of what we consider valuable will be thrown away or given away, so we
might as well and try to do some of that ourselves.
I hate
dusting so the knickknacks will be the first to go. I am only going to keep the most valuable,
those I cannot do without. I guess the piggy bank I had since college and the
Buddha I bought when I was a hippy will have to go. I own more sets of dishes
than I will ever wear out in the time I have left so they too will be history. And I really, really do not need two
blenders, two mixers, and two punch bowls.
It might
be time to throw away all the plastic containers without lids or give away my collection
of Wilton cake pans to the granddaughter who aspires to be a chef. Maybe I can toss the bag of squashed bows I
keep in the closet for emergency gift wrapping.
Both my ex-grandmother-in-law
and my ex-mother-in-law gave me their Jewel T dishes for safekeeping. I have
never used them except for display, so now may be the time to pass those on to
my daughter.
I pray
(fervently) that my kids think twice before buying me a knickknack for
Christmas. I like chocolate and cash. A
gift card would be nice.
Downsizing
will be difficult for HB and me, but it makes us realize that things are just
that – things. They might have memories attached to them, reminders of the
person who gave the gift, mementos of places and times in our lives, but it
would be wonderful to be unencumbered. It
would be nice to own things and not let them own us.
Did I
mention how much I HATE dusting?
Comments
Post a Comment