One year for my birthday, my son gifted me a self-help book called The Hoarder In You: How to live a happier, healthier, uncluttered life, by Robin Zasio. He gave it to me, rather unceremoniously, saying, “You’re not going to like this.” I did not resent his gift and I read it promptly, but with a recognition that my son and his wife were more selective and decisive about what came into their house, and to their eye, Bill and I were constantly picking up stuff from the side of the road. This was somewhat true, as people in Princeton put some really great stuff on the side of the road! Our house was rather cluttered. But as I read the book, I concluded that my hoarding merited only an average mark. Perhaps it was not so much hoarding as it was a difference of style and philosophy of curating our home space. Young families seem to gravitate toward minimalism in their home décor. They also do not prefer old furniture, though the styles may again be evolving so that vintage furniture is making a comeback. More recently, Marie Kondo has become a known guru of evaluating one’s home furnishings and possessions in general. Her question, “Does this possession spark joy?” was the rubric to evaluate whether to keep or pitch an item. That question sparked pushback: I found an article by Joshua Becker on the site becomingminimalist.com who complains that Americans own “excessive possessions” creating an expensive and exhausting “material overload” which Kondo’s question does not adequately address.
Bill and I inhabited the same parsonage for 35 years. A lot of living and its related collecting went on during that time. We had various reasons for acquiring stuff, ranging from routine needs, to receiving gifts, to inheriting from relatives, to scavenging from Princeton curbs, to materials produced in the living of family life. We homeschooled our four children from kindergarten to eighth grade during that period, preserving a record of our schooling to satisfy any government inspectors, year after year boxing up the materials used and produced throughout the school year. Also in the category of papers, back in the day when people wrote letters, we received and saved letters from beloved persons. In the loosely defined category of furniture, antiques and collectibles – a number of our progenitors passed away during those years, leaving behind their belongings. Many of those belongings were sentimental and others were valuable. Those are just three examples of “stuff” we had to evaluate. As we came to this past year, anticipating our move, we knew we did not want to move all that we had accumulated to our new house.
The soft start to the culling process began in the fall of 2023. My daughter and son-in-law taught me how to sell things on Facebook Marketplace. I googled many of the items and saw what prices they were selling for on Etsy or eBay. Then I marked them down to sell on Marketplace. There was a temptation to monetize my discards which shaded toward greed. Most of these items we had acquired for free. However, some of my buyers commented that my prices were low, and the evidence was apparent in how quickly certain things sold. And we put free items on our curb, and let nearby residents and passers-by pick them up, which they did quickly. Besides greed, I had an additional motivation which was to promote re-use rather than just trashing.
I tried to cull letters, and quickly realized that the letters brought back memories that would otherwise be lost to me, of people and the relationships we had that I was increasingly prone to forgetting. I recycled a letter or two and then decided to abandon that task. I felt I was in danger of throwing away a person, and I concluded that it would be better to bring my four plus boxes of stored letters and Christmas cards here to Colorado. I am very glad for that decision. Remembering people and circling back to them is a form of service to them.
Going through the homeschool boxes was very laborious. A banker’s box looked small, but going through one piece of paper at a time took a day per box. I got better at it, box by box, and quickly was able to recycle math, spelling and science worksheets. However, the essays my children wrote over those years were priceless! A shout out to the Westerly Learning Center (now the Stone Hill Learning Center) of Princeton, NJ, for aiding home schoolers in providing their children with a beautiful and ambitious educational supplement to what we did at home. The essays proved that my children were learning to be responsible stewards of the environment and compassionate citizens back in the 1990’s and forward, before either idea had become reigning dogma in our American culture. That was because those Christian teachers were guided by the Bible to be good stewards of God’s creation, and to treat every human being as a person made in the image of God. Somehow I had not adequately registered and remembered that. Had I not kept those boxes I would not have been reminded of God’s provision to us over those schooling years, which was cause for expressing gratitude both to God and to those gifted teachers.
We kept all of our kids’ toys over the years that were special to them. During the process of going through the toys this summer, my daughter from Colorado came with her twin girls to help. I am not exaggerating to say that the girls were ENCHANTED with our collection of toys. This was partly because they were novel, not what they had at home. But it was also a reflection on the quality of the toys – we kept what our children had played with for hours on end. I asked the girls if Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Colorado needed to have toys and they both answered yes emphatically. I remembered my enchantment going to my grandparents and great-aunt’s homes and playing with the toys they had kept. Those are happy memories. That reminded me of the holidays when all five of our grandchildren have assembled our puzzles, played our games, cuddled with our stuffed animals, and made up stories with our Playmobil sets. Of course it was worth putting them on the moving truck. We got rid of toys which all five had already outgrown, although that is hard to determine. We simply had too many toys, and we made some people happy selling them at low cost or, in some cases, gifting some special sets.
Fast forward to now, because you may not find this report of my overthinking quite as scintillating as I mean it to be! My granddaughters have just had their first sleepover in our house. We got out a selection of American Girl sized clothes and furniture saved from our children. There were two wooden doll beds which Bill made, and mattresses, sheets, pillows, and quilts which I had sewed. There were other furniture items my sister had given them for Christmas and a collection of hats, shoes and outfits. There was a cabinet of ceramic dishes, and one item has already gotten broken by six-year-old girls learning how to be careful with fragile things. As I looked around at all the fragile things we moved here, Bill and I both have given some thought to hosting our grandchildren and other loved people in our home without worrying about our stuff constantly. Some things we will just put away before they come. But other things are meant to be used and not merely admired from a safe distance. And I was so proud of my granddaughter for coming to me immediately with all the broken pieces of a doll vase collected on the counter for Grandpa to fix. Bill can fix almost anything! It was good to remember in that moment how much more valuable are people than things, and to be able to reply in a way that reinforced her honesty and reassured her that she is loved, “These things happen!” When we decided what to move to our new house, we didn’t ask the question, “Does this spark joy?” We asked much more consistently whether the things we would pack and bring served people.