I’ve written about how I recently dealt with the sentimental paper clutter I’d been carting around for years.  Now I need to confess to some non-paper, large item, sentimental clutter that I struggle over.

The first involves a bit of back story.  I’d been helping my mom’s family clean out my grandmother’s home and garage, and I’d been able to select and keep a few furniture pieces that held loads of memories for me.  I was so glad to bring home these items; they put a smile on my face and made me think of her.  As the moving truck pulled up in our driveway, I gave directions on where I wanted the things to go.  We were the last stop on their list for the day; they’d dropped some things off at my sister’s house and my parent’s house and now were finishing their job at ours.

After getting things placed in the right rooms, I headed back into the garage, where I discovered them unloading a decrepit, broken-legged cedar chest onto the garage floor, complete with unattached lid (with holes in it).

I flipped.  “I said I didn’t want that!!” I hollered, in a joking-but-not-really-joking way.

One of the movers cracked up.  “Yeah, he said you’d say that,” he laughed, referring to my dad.

And why, you ask, would I not just cart the falling-apart cedar chest to the curb and pitch it?  Because my great-grandfather made it.  Those little words completely transform my view of that piece of furniture; it makes me responsible for it, in a way, and makes me feel the need to fix it, to mend it, to make it usable again, however that might be done.

The other piece of furniture is a beautiful chair that was in my other grandparents’ home.  It has an ornately carved back of dark wood, with hand-embroidered back and seat cushions done by my grandmother:  again, she made it, and now I feel responsible for it.  It actually hadn’t been a problem until our last move; up until now, the chair always had a place to “live,” even if it didn’t exactly match the rest of the house.  Here, though, there really was no place to put it; it was just sitting in the basement collecting dust, until my daughter needed a chair in her room.  I threw a bedsheet over it and cinched it with a big purple ribbon:  instant slipcover for a chair that would have otherwise never been used.  (My dad was teasing me about being so cheap that I didn’t want to buy a chair, but it’s hard to justify buying a chair when there’s a usable one stashed in the basement.)

I think this is my biggest struggle with some sentimental “stuff:”  that sense of responsibility toward it, the feeling that it’s my “job” to “take care” of it; that it’s been “entrusted” to me.  There are plenty of sentimental things that I’m happy to have, but some items have turned into burdens more than blessings.  In spite of that, I admit that I don’t know how to get past that idea of “responsibility” and finally let go of them.

Three houses ago, we moved for the “last time.”  (Haha.)  But three houses ago was when I cleaned out my bedroom at my parents’ house, and took everything I wanted to keep.  Most of that stuff was books; even back then, I knew I didn’t want to be moving books constantly.  I waited till we were settled, where we would be living “for good,” and then moved the books, along with more sentimental stuff like notes and letters from friends, papers I wrote in school….you get the idea.

Over the course of the next few years, I lost my grandparents, and gained more sentimental things:  this time, furniture related.  (I joke that our house is decorated in “acquired traditional.”)  Now, though, I was becoming more aware of how overwhelming all this “stuff” could be, because I was helping to clean out the houses, and I was becoming much more deliberate in the choices I was making.  Do I want my grandmother’s corner cabinets from her dining room?  Yes, please!  Do I want nine-tenths of the other furniture?  Absolutely not.

Two moves later, I was finally able to look at some of this “keepsake” stuff and be a bit more harsh in my evaluations:  our lugging it around so much had a lot to do with my change in attitude towards all of it.  One afternoon I forced myself to go through boxes of old photos and was able to pitch three-quarters of them.   I’d been taking pictures since middle school, and who wants pictures from middle school?  Ugh.  I read through old notes and letters, and was horrified at how obnoxiously self-centered I was:  trash it.  I went through my binders of papers written for school:  out.

One over-arching rule dictated my ruthlessness:  does this make me smile?  A few photos, a few notes and letters, yes, absolutely!  They brought a smile to my face every time I looked at them.  But after moving pounds and pounds of papers, over and over, I thought I was ready to let go.  Once they hit the recycling bin, I kept waiting for the sense of panic I sort of expected:  What have you done??  You got rid of that?!?  But it never came.  Instead, I was surprised to find that I felt more relief than panic.  We’re not planning on moving again, but that’s a lot less stuff to have to deal with if we do.

I think that rule is a good place to start when dealing with sentimental clutter:  does this make me smile?  Most of my paper stuff had been carried around for so long that lots of it meant very little to me anymore, and once I finally made myself go through it, it was remarkably easy to plow through quite quickly.

What if everything makes you smile?  What if you’re knee-deep in sentiment and all of it “makes you smile,” but you’re overwhelmed by the amount and know that you need to give some away?  Take a picture.  If you’re really crafty you could make a scrapbook full of “special” things, and write why they’re special–and then pass on the things.  If you’re not so creatively talented, keep the photos stored on your computer and look at them whenever you want a smile–and then pass on the things.  (A screen-saver of “special things” could be great–a continual scroll of things that make you smile.)

I’m definitely not one of those people who thinks you should get rid of everything.  There comes a point, though, where it really is too much, and I think we know it when we get there.  That is the time to do something about it.  Preferably before your sixth move.

I drive down our neighborhood streets after dropping the kids off at school and am in awe of trash day.  Every Friday, we pull our bins to the curb, and every Friday, it’s a learning experience.  Some houses will occasionally have stuffed-to-the-rim bins–you can tell they’ve just tackled a basement or a garage.  Other people have clearly moved in or out; large cardboard boxes stacked next to the recycling bins and lots of extra garbage for the week.  And there are a few houses–maybe one or two–who constantly, consistently, have trash bins overflowing, week after week after week.

Those are the houses that get me.  I’m amazed by the amount of waste generated by an “average” family in an “average” area of an “average” city.  I actually wonder how they do it.  Do they just have a really big family?  Do they not recycle at all?  Do they just buy that much stuff?  Are they cleaning out years worth of accumulation?  (This neighborhood is not that old.)  How do they do that?

So there I am, on my high horse, with my family that generates one bag of trash a week (though definitely a full recycling bin every two).  I consider it a successful birthday party if we can still throw away one bag of trash on party week; it’s actually something I really work toward.  (Silly, I know.)  I hate the idea that there are people who are piling on in landfills without a care in the world.

And now…..

Now we are tearing apart our decrepit deck, and there is a dumpster sitting in our driveway.  No more high horse for me.  We are about to generate, in two days worth of demolition, more trash that we’ve probably put out in our entire time living here.  Now I will take my self-inflated ego, newly punctured and deflated, and admit that yes, we make trash, too.  Sometimes, we make lots of it.  There comes a time, though, when I have to recognize that something just isn’t usable.  It isn’t recyclable, or donatable, or–in this case–even safe.  Sometimes, things have to get thrown away.  Hopefully, next week, we’ll be back to one bag of trash.  But it will take a lot of “one bag” trash days to make up for this morning.