Stuff

My husband and I have admitted that as long as everyone in our family is safe, our house burning down would feel like a blessing… once we all recovered from disbelief.
We hang on to so much useless-to-us stuff, letting it camp in boxes, drawers, closet-backs, above cabinets, in a dank garage, on high storage shelves, in a neglected filing cabinet, even plain sight, in the form of never-to-be-opened-again-by-us books.
My dear and I wish to be minimalists (so far as inanimate objects we call ours), but getting there takes effort. Worth the work, but we dawdle, daunted by the prospect of voluntarily letting go neat things and the emotional tearing off of a band-aid so to speak.
I weigh 137 lbs, so says my father’s bathroom scale. No mechanism can register the weight of accumulated matter that I keep around either because I’d rather not deal with sorting and properly parting with no-longer-needed items or from unhealthy attachments, as in the case of three Ikea drawers holding “spare” pens, most of them full of gunked up ink, pens we might “need” someday. Honestly I didn’t know we had so many pens until yesterday when my son asked for helping putting up his cool new Pokemon poster and I went in search of thumb tacks.
Note to self: purge the pen supply please!
When it comes to writing implements, attachment may be too strong a word. But what of the cute baby clothes hanging around in a blue plastic box, high up on a shelf in a spare room. I’m attached to the memory of our boys wearing these precious fabrics and intend to dress our next child, should we have another, in the same beauty. I don’t know where to draw the line.
Leo Buscaglia wrote of a people who move every six months when monsoon season arrives. How attached or pseudo-practical could one be when consuming waters come every year, demanding rafts be built, floating dwellings to live on until land is available once more. Yet, the big rain visits again in a few short months. I do not wish to live and move to the rhythm of extreme weather, but holding onto nothing but my family and a few truly necessary possessions does sound extraordinarily sane.
This day is 10 of 30 for my self-assigned clearing project. I sold a few cupcake pans and assorted kitchen supplies this morning and expect to part with more this afternoon and evening. Yesterday, we sold the bulk of our baking supplies to a minister and his wife. They have a large congregation and a church with two kitchens. Glad our wares will be put to good use.