I’ve decided it’s time to purge my home of stuff. It is usually this time of year when I change from winter clothes to my summer time clothes. However, this year it’s a bit different. I’m giving away a house full of things I’ve haven’t used for a long time. Twenty years of collecting, traveling, shopping, impulse buying and gift exchanges have left my apartment full. I would keep my stuff, but I’m about to begin inheriting stuff from my mother and mother-in-law and they have finer, nicer stuff than I do.
My husband and I live in a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. It’s perfect for us. Enough room for our selves but when you get, get, get or buy, buy, buy and receive, receive, receive, the stuff begins to pile up. My greatest fear is becoming the Collyer brothers and being literally buried alive by stuff. Not only that but I have to admit my mother is a hoarder and so are all her sisters. They can’t get rid of anything because they can always use it. My mother won’t even throw away a coke bottle she found under her house because “it’s worth something, it’s valuable, people collect bottles”. In January I went to visit my mom in Texas and as I waited for her in the car I noticed that the walls of her little red house were literary bulging.
Did you ever watch the sitcom Sanford and Son? Well, that’s how my mom lives times ten. Her front door is unusable because she has stuff in front of it on the inside and the outside of the door. I haven’t been inside my mother’s home since 1998, but when I was last there pathways connected the rooms of the house. From the living room you can vaguely see the front door because she has a sofa, linens, and boxes of unopened mail piled in front of it. On the outside of the front door she has very large plants which block the door, you have to navigate your way from the curb to the front porch where the doorbell and mail box are located because the yard has so many plants randomly planted. I think my mom just digs a hole whatever she is standing and plants get planted right there. She has accomplished making a seventeen-foot wide cactus barrier between her house and her neighbor whom she despises.
My mother-in-law is very similar to my mother, but she has more money for storage places and people to help her organize her stuff in an orderly fashion. My mother and mother-in-law even collect houses and cars to store their stuff and now that they are getting up in age, they have to consolidate their stuff. My mother-in-law is moving into a smaller house and selling her proprieties. So, alas I am cleaning out five houses and one apartment. If I haven’t started clearing my mother’s junk before if she dies, I might just light match and set it all on fire. I bet it will be one of the best bon fires in South Texas.
Hopefully the organizing will take shape into a home with minimalism at its core. I only want things that are useful and being used, or at least that is my goal even if it may be unreachable.
