Decluttering ~ my column from Sunday's paper

It seemed like our home was closing in around us. A few weeks ago while reaching for something on the top shelf, an avalanche of books, papers, and a box of pencils comically pinged my head like a bell. “It’s time to get rid of some stuff,” I said to myself.

Serendipity kicked in, as it often does, by serving up a story about a book on The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo.  After reading a brief summary, I ordered the book from Amazon.com. 

 A few days later, the UPS man silently delivered it to the side porch one afternoon while we were napping. 

Jilda was under the weather with the flu that week, but she felt strong enough to sit on the couch and read the book while sipping a few cups of steaming green tea.

I was happy she read it because it would do no good for me to get on a decluttering kick if

she wasn’t invested in the idea too.

When she finished, I started reading. It's an excellent book, and the author has a great approach to decluttering. But her situation is different from ours because she looks to be in her twenties. I have shoes that are older.

Jilda and I will celebrate our 42 wedding anniversary in May. The number of years we’ve been together is a major factor in the amount of stuff we’ve accumulated. An added issue is we both had mothers who survived the Great Depression and rarely discarded ANYTHING that might remotely be useful later on. “These apples didn’t fall far from the tree,” as the old saying goes.

When I started evaluating my closet and under our bed, it was a little scary. As it turns out, I needed to do a little decluttering before I could even start the process described by Kondo.

That first day, I took a truckload of things to Goodwill that still had a lot of use in them, but were no longer things we needed. 

Kondo recommends a particular order and suggests doing it all at one time. I get that, but the sheer volume of things in our house made it difficult doing it all at once.  

Over the following days, I went through my closet and pulled out all the jeans and tried them on. Any that didn’t fit right got tossed in the bag. Some of them looked brand new but there was one pair of bell bottoms I wore after we married. My legs fit into the jeans, but the zipper wouldn’t budge past halfway. Who would have guessed 40 pounds would do that to your rear end?

After getting my closet in order, I’ve found that it takes me a fraction of the time to get dressed.

We’re saving the hardest part of the decluttering chore until the end. Going through the books, photographs, and knick-knacks will be the most difficult because there’s a lot of history to sort through. The criteria Kondo uses in the book is a good one I think. If something doesn’t “give us joy,” we need to pass it on to someone else.

Spring cleaning is refreshing, but we’re hiding the problem. We often move the things we no longer need to get them out of sight. The only issue is that our shed and closet have been full for years.
    
Real change only happens when we rid ourselves of things we’re keeping, “just in case.”  Our mothers would have had a conniption at the thought of tossing something we might need later, but our little home seems to be breathing a sigh of relief.