less is more

At 20, I stuffed all my worldly goods into the trunk of the car and moved. At 70, I will spend days stuffing a box or two of my worldly goods into the trunk of the car and moving it to sell, trash or donate How did it become so much? Maybe it began the week Hubby forgot to pick up bread before he came home. With a bare-bread cupboard, I pulled out a package of yeast, the flour bin and a jug of oil. I laid it all out on the counter. Everything I needed except the bread pan. No one had given us one as a wedding gift. I decided the loaf cake pan would do in a pinch. After I made the dough, I shaped it into two long rolls and placed them in the cake pan. We had fresh bread for supper. Like many other things in those simple, early years, we made do. As soon as I could, I bought bread pans: long and short pans, glass rectangles, glass tubes for fancy, party bread, miniature pans for individual loaves and the crowning purchase, a bread making kit with four matching gold pans and a bucket with a dough hook. I felt so rich. It wasn’t enough. When I found teflon coated bread pans at a yard sale, I bought those. When I found miniature pans I bought those. When I found disposable bread pans I could use for holiday gifts I bought those. Over the years the cupboard of baking equipment has grown exponentially. From the early years of not much to our latter years, we overflow with an abundance of stuff. We’re not just overflowing in the kitchen. In the toy closet, the sewing room, the shop, the bedrooms and every nook and cranny. I have arrived at the “too much stuff” stage of life. The time has come to reduce my stash. We have too many accessories and notions in the sewing room, too much fabric, too many clothes, too many mementoes of times past and too little space to enjoy them in the present. Too many books, and I say that as a bibliophile who collects books to give away, books to read and books that still grab my attention after the third or fourth read. It’s not that I haven’t decluttered in the past. I am not a hoarder, just a collector of things I might use someday or simply enjoy owning today. But now, many years into retirement, I go to estate sales and see how much others leave behind. I read articles of family members spending long days sorting through all their parents’ accumulation. Plus, my children emphatically say, “I don’t want it.” Okay, I understand that. We have acquired much through the years. Memorabilia, memories plus many family members. We have half a dozen children, eighteen grand-children and eighteen great-grandchildren. None of them want the stuff that we have, not even the bits and pieces we cherished for years just to pass along to them. I can do without most of the stuff. I will keep all the family, even though none of them want our junk, not even the good stuff. This spring we began to remove everything from the bookshelves and are re-homing everything except the photo albums and boxes of family pictures.One of these days I may once again have pared everything down so that I can move it all in the trunk of one car. The stuff goes; we are keeping the family and plan to always have room for one more anytime, anywhere, any way.