Over three months, a constant torrent of stuff streamed out of our house--forty-eight boxes of books, some wooden spoons, a pressure cooker, my graduate school notebooks, a coin collection, the cheese press my husband made for me.... The books went to the library sale; the pressure cooker and the coin collection went to the auction; and I gave away the cheese press. The grad school notebooks I guiltily jettisoned into the rental dumpster that decorated our yard.
Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, I feel qualified to pass on the following advice to those of you who are contemplating a similar move or are simply feeling trapped by too much stuff:
Don't give yourself a lot of
time. It’s going to be agony no matter
how you do it, so take a deep breath and rip off the band-aid in one swift yank.
Remember that you are not your
possessions. More than that, your dearly
departed--your mother who gave you that vase, the friend who painted that
picture--are not that vase, or that picture.
They are not even IN the vase or the picture. They are in your memories, and in
your heart. It's o.k. to let go of the things they left behind.
Don’t foist your treasures on your
descendants. It’s not their fault that
on your wedding day you received seven silver nut dishes for which you have no
use or space. It’s not their fault that
in a moment of madness you spent half your rent money on that oak Victorian desk. They have no space for the desk, and they are too busy to polish silver.
Possibly they have never liked the dishes or the desk. Taste in furnishings is not necessarily
transmitted in the DNA. Don’t take it
personally.
If you decide to sell things, don’t
expect to get for them anything near their real value, let alone the sentimental worth that
they have accumulated for you over the years. In this day of cheap goods, we are all drowning in material
possessions. Selling
your things for a
pittance, or giving them away, is the price you pay to have them
disappear from your life, and it's a small price for the relief you will
feel.
Trust me when I say that most objects, once
you let them go, you will never miss.
You may never even remember them.
You think you’ll never be the same without your blue glass
canning jars? Go ahead and wrap them in newspaper, put them in a box
from the liquor
store and send them to the auction. Once they’re out the door, if you ever think of them
again it will be with the same serene fondness with which you now recall that
boy you loved so desperately in high school, and the broken heart you thought would never mend.(Sorry for the weird formatting--I can't seem to be able to fix it.)
