The whole time my sisters and I sorted through our parents’ belongings to pare things down to size for their move to assisted living (see Fresh Off of Travel Status) we sang one common refrain: “When I get back home, I’m doing this with our stuff!”
Michelle has wanted to reduce significantly for the last few months, so she welcomes my conversion to this new “faith”. An enthusiasm for reducing our material possessions conflicts with my general homesteading attitude, which is to store extras against the day our current goods get used up. Nevertheless, I see a lot of opportunities for reducing our inventory.
For instance, we learned that some young friends have been “grinding” coffee beans by crushing them in a bag with a heavy coffee mug! Not anymore. They now use my extra coffee grinder, a device I’ll likely never need, as my primary grinder outlived its last owner, and should outlive me.
Not only did we develop the desire to reduce clutter, we saw the importance of proper documentation. We sorted through many boxes of photographs. Most had no explanation of when they were taken, who or what the subject was, or why the image had significance. Luckily, I found an acid-free photo pen in one of the boxes, and actually captioned some of the photos I found. Sometimes, that came in handy even to make quick note of explanation to my sisters, so they could see the photo, then toss it. Beth bought Michelle and me a weekend at a B&B near one of our homes, and I found a photo that showed our cabin interior. No need to keep the photo, but, “on the way to the trash, here’s what the place looked like.”
This even led to some strategic hoarding of our own. I found packets of photos from Michelle’s and my move to Juneau from the Lower 48. I tossed them, but then dug them out again to bring them home. Almost certainly, our own copies of these photos weren’t as carefully explained as these. I’ll swap out my parents’ copies for ours, and throw our captionless copies away.
This may not be the time for such a project; the salmon run has started, mushrooms are sprouting, I have to get the winter’s firewood cut and stacked, and all the other chores of high summer loom, particularly after 10 days away. Still, if I can maintain the motivation, and whittle away as opportunity presents, I can purge a lot of extra material from the homestead.
I think it takes the experience Mark of having to clean out our parent’s clutter to make us look at what we need to do at home too. Having to move my in-laws to a nursing home several years ago and the pain of cleaning out their house after 40 plus years of accumulation made me really examine what I keep and what I can recycle. I admire you for your purging efforts – and I’m sure that made Michelle happy!
Thanks, Eva. You’re right, although we benefit greatly from the experience of paring down 14 years of life in one home to move to this homestead, plus the added benefit(?) of needing to haul almost everything we kept over the ridge on our backs. That came after years of nomadic living–Michelle counted 14 household moves in the first 11 years of our marriage. So, we’re already ahead of the game. This latest experience, though, has re-energized me away from complacency.
Michelle will be happy, but she’s probably waiting to see if my actions match my words. She knows me very well!