Some years ago, when I first had this website, I did a “clutter manifesto” blog. Well, guess what, clutter continues to accumulate in my life, my house, my brain. I finally “admitted it is unmanageable” and “sought help”. Hired a clutter coach. She came to look at my office. A six- month job. Baby steps. First the papers, then the books, then the art supplies, and so on. She is also an artist, so she GETS IT that my office is SUPPOSED to be more of a studio/sanctuary than “an office”.
So far, we have worked together for 6 hours. Have recycled POUNDS of paper. The floor in my office is now visible in many places. Progress. She will come tomorrow, and Wednesday afternoon as well. We will keep chipping away at it. In the process, perhaps I will learn some better habits, since I was clearly playing hooky or in the bathroom the day the neat and orderly genes were handed out.
I have wrestled with clutter, chaos and disorder all my life. Each new school year, I would begin with a fresh new binder, new notebooks, pencils. I would label the binder tabs and notebooks. I would resolve to stay organized THIS TIME. This would last for maybe the first two weeks of school. Kind of like when I used to drink and would decide to “only have two glasses of wine tonight”. We know where that led.
Being a mixed media collage artist means that along with art supplies, I also keep all manner of materials that may find their way into an art piece. I keep pressed leaves, glass shards, tiny gears from clocks, textured packing material, a rusted iron hoop, a railroad spike. A well-preserved dead dragon fly. Turtle shells. Bins of shells and stones from rambles. Even though I have organized and reorganized this motley collection, it still gets (and stays) away from me. My hope is that this time, my coach and I will come up with a plan for storing all this stuff that I can stay with for the long haul.
I was raised by a mother who grew up in the Great Depression, who became a collector of silver- plated flatware and other bargains she found at “junk stores”. Her house was always full of stuff and no horizontal surface was clear for more than five minutes (just like mine!). Once in the 1970’s she cleaned out a chest freezer in the basement and discovered food she’d frozen in 1957. Grace also saved string, jar lids, old ornithological society newsletters – yellow paper, blank on one side – GROCERY LISTS! Two rooms in her house were filled with stuff. And after I moved away for good, my old room sprouted tall metal shelves that were packed with stuff, leaving a path to the bed where I slept when I visited.
I dealt with Grace’s accumulation of stuff three times—when she left the house in Bear in 1999, when I cleared her Jenner’s Pond apartment in 2002, and finally when I emptied her storage unit and cleared out the room where she spent her last three months. I gave away, threw away, sold and recycled mountains of things. I still ended up with probably 2/3 of her silver-plated flatware collection – now in my barn, basement, attic, dining room, bedroom and office. I still ended up with probably 6 big plastic bins of stuff which now sit in the attic. Nothing valuable there, just stuff I couldn’t bear to part with in 2002—after 17 years, I think I may be able to re-home the towels, bedding etc. at the City Mission.
When I got to be sixty, it came to me that many of us spend the first two thirds of our lives accumulating stuff, and if we are smart, we will spend the last third re-distributing it. As I have moved into the second half of my 60’s this has begun to feel more urgent, and my tolerance for disorder has lessened. However, when my schedule is full of travel, work, teaching, making art or editing a manuscript, I go into some kind of “clutter blind” state where I come and go and literally don’t see it.
This time feels different, and I hope it is. I do not want to live in a perpetual state of chaos (the inside of my brain is chaotic enough!) and I do not want to leave Jon with a mountain of STUFF, which at the very least would force him to hire several dumpsters and fill them when I have moved on. There is a Scandinavian practice not sure which country, maybe Sweden, of “death cleaning” where people dispose of their worldly goods before they leave the planet. Sounds like a good plan to me. Stay tuned.