Keep Or Give Away
Are you the kind of person who senses clutter hiding in your garage or attic, or are you the kind of person who takes an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to what you inevitably accumulate over time? Stuff in the attic doesn’t bother me at all, but it bothers my wife. She knows it is in there, lurking, sometimes for decades.
If you are the sort of person who hasn’t moved in a long time, there is a chance that you too have accumulated a lot of “stuff.” Unless vigilance is exercised, the molehill can become a mountain.
My parents grew up in the depression and through World War II, a time of scarcity and rationing. My mother did not throw away aluminum foil. She carefully rinsed and folded it to use again. This makes a lot of sense to me. It takes a lot of energy to produce aluminum foil, and it seems a shame to just crumple it up in a ball and throw it away after a single use. I admit I follow in her eco-friendly footsteps.
Actually, it isn’t just aluminum. I have great difficulty throwing away anything made of metal. I have hundreds of mismatched screws, bolts, nails, and other little unknown hardware items secreted away in the garage in various glass jars, old coffee cans, and other miscellaneous containers I collect for this very purpose. They aren’t sorted or organized, so in the off chance that I actually need a particular hardware item, it typically takes me less time just to go to the store than to find what I need out of my own collection. Thus, the collection grows.
My wife’s weakness is bags. She has dozens of them, stored within each other, at various locations throughout the house. Occasionally, I find a previously undiscovered bag stash. It is difficult to say whether my accumulation of random hardware items is outpacing her accumulation of bags.
Periodically, at her insistence, we execute a “keep or give away” session. Invariably, we wind up keeping most of the stuff we evaluate because of the possibility that one day, it might come in handy. We haven’t yet tried a popular decluttering approach, in which one is supposed to hold up an item and ask, “Does this give me joy?” If it doesn’t bring joy, out it goes.
The other day, we were taking another run at our attic in Bend to see what could be thrown out, recycled, or donated, when I came across this mint-condition Viking Hat. We came into its possession the same way we acquired the banana suit, from our kids. They do not yet have houses of their own, so are forced to minimize their possessions.
We keep some things for purely sentimental reasons. I’m in my own special category in this regard. I kept the Wampanoag diorama hidden in the attic of our old home that my youngest daughter and I had stayed up in the wee hours of the night to finish for an elementary school project. Unlike some elementary school projects, this one did not look like it had benefited from the help of an adult. It was not immediately apparent to the casual observer that it was a Wampanoag dwelling. That project stayed in the attic all the way through her college graduation.
Then, we moved. Moving is one of the fantastic forcing events for the removal of unnecessary items. What has been hidden in the attic must come out. Every time, you have the opportunity to lighten your load.
Most reluctantly, I agreed that the tattered and decaying art projects didn’t need to make the trip across the country to our new home. I took pictures of them instead - that is another thing I accumulate, digital photos, thousands and thousands of them.
The box of swimming trophies and ribbons made the cut, even though our older daughter advised us to throw them out; I couldn’t do it. I just saw them during the attic inspection - they are still waiting for her and her husband to have their own house, so they can start accumulating their own collection of stuff.
We drove a U-Haul truck to Michigan. What an adventure! When we were unpacking the truck, I had an epiphany; I realized we had moved a bunch of junk from our old house to our new one. I could have taken almost everything down to our town give-and-take and driven a car.
Most towns in the western suburbs of Massachusetts have give-and-take sections at their local dump or transfer station. People leave stuff they don’t need anymore, and other people pick it up for free. My problem with the town give-and-take was that I would drop one thing off and come back with three more things that I decided I might be able to use at some point in the future. One has to be ruthless to avoid this situation.
I’ll give you an example of something that shouldn’t have made the trip. When I originally bought my house in Sudbury, among the other questionable items the previous owners convinced me that I might one day use (lumber, tools, nails of all shapes and sizes), they gifted me a theoretically operable water pump, something I could use to irrigate my lawn with water from a pond on my property.
That never actually happened, but since we were moving to a much bigger body of water, Lake Michigan, I thought I should bring this pump along. It could come in handy in Michigan. Guess what? It is now sitting in the Michigan garage, waiting for a chance to move some water. (On a happy note, the four come-alongs that I brought out have come in handy.)
Like throwing away aluminum foil, there is something wasteful about holding on to stuff that other people could actually use. So while I still vigorously maintain that it isn’t doing any harm in the garage or attic, I’m recommitting to finding a new home for most of it, except, of course, for the Viking Hat and the banana suit.