A place for everything

I decided a couple of weeks ago to empty out my email in-box.

I didn’t intend it as a symbolic gesture, but, as sometimes happens with clean-up projects, it took on a larger meaning once I got started. It wasn’t that I expected to delete all of the sixty-two messages in my in-box; I just wanted to sort them all into folders. In general, I’m pretty good about using email folders for work-related projects and volunteer committee work, but so many correspondences seem to defy easy classification. And so I just let them sit there in my in-box.

It occurred to me that perhaps, that signified a bigger problem. It didn’t seem like I should have any correspondence that I had no way of classifying. So I resolved that I would put every single in-box correspondence into a folder. Anything I felt I needed to keep was hereby required to be assigned some kind of identity. And no cheating by using “Miscellaneous” or “Random” labels either, I told myself.

But some emails just contained little intriguing quotes from my daily inspirational email subscription. Okay then, I decided, there would be a label for “Inspirations.” And some were emails complimenting articles I’d written. Well, then, why not a folder for “Compliments”? Confirmations of items I’d ordered but not yet received became “Pending orders.”

What I quickly discovered with this simple exercise was the beauty of taxonomy, of determining that there’s a place for everything, even if it’s a virtual rather than material place. From that point, it was easy to make the analytical leap to conceding that anything that defied labeling probably wasn’t an email I needed.

Once my email in-box was empty, I resolved to go through the same exercise every day. That part was easy. But then I took a critical look around my house and wondered if the same principles that worked for virtual correspondence could be applied to household clutter. In theory, I already had a designated place for everything that mattered: recipes, pay stubs, pet medications, office supplies, tickets to upcoming events, musical instruments. And yet still, random items piled up on shelves and tables, in closets and in corners, just as they do in everyone else’s house. Is it possible, I asked myself, to make a rule that if I can’t figure out where it should be stored, then we probably don’t need it?

It strikes me as a fairly aggressive approach to household clean-up, and we’re not quite there yet. I still can’t figure out where to put empty candy boxes that Holly has decorated with ribbons and stickers, or vacation postcards whose images I want to admire just a little longer, or a pretty bottle that once held olive oil. But just thinking about it this way helps a little. If it really matters, figure out where it goes, I tell myself, and within minutes, the ever-accumulating clutter piles have been reduced.

True, those piles grow back, just as my in-box accrues new emails every day. It’s not a perfect system. I still lose emails because I can’t remember how I labeled them (but gmail makes it easy to search by sender or topic), and I certainly haven’t quite defeated the clutter problem in our house. But it’s an interesting way to approach the problem, and I haven’t given up yet.

A little too much minimalism

Yesterday on NPR’s On Point, I heard authors Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, founders of the website theminimalists.com, discuss the process that transformed them from people who actively pursued material gain to people devoted to a lifelong process of stripping down. One of them described an experiment in which he packed everything he owned into boxes, as if he was moving, although he wasn’t. Then he unpacked things only as he needed them, in order to find out what objects he really had use for in the course of a day, a week or a month.

We’re doing that experiment too, only not so much as an experiment in minimalism as just because it’s easier for the time being. When we moved here in spring of 2011, we thought we might be able to stay only a year; it turned into longer, but we still haven’t bothered to unpack all the boxes in the garage. In the past 20 months, we’ve done just what the minimalist author described: unpacked only what we needed. And so we too can tell what objects matter most to us.

Of course, 20 months with a family of four makes for a fairly broad range of material needs, or at least material uses. Dishes and kitchen appliances were unpacked within hours of the move; clothes and linens too. Over the next several weeks, the kids brought out games and books and craft supplies. Now that we’ve been here well over a year, any decorations we own for any particular holiday have been uncovered, and so has just about all of our athletic equipment and computer accessories. Last Labor Day weekend, we unearthed the lobster steamer and lobster crackers for the first time since moving.

So in a way, the author is right; this is a great way to see what you really need. When we do move again, we’ll have to take a very critical look at anything that has stayed boxed all this time. The only problem is that there’s one large category of items we never unpacked but that I still can’t think of as superfluous: sentimental objects. We don’t have a single wedding photo in our current house; it didn’t seem worth unwrapping them from their protective casing. In fact, we don’t have any framed photos at all here, except for the kids’ school photos, taken earlier this fall. Last summer I pulled out a few vases, but we have other knickknacks – some heirlooms passed down, some collectibles from our travels, others wedding gifts – that we haven’t bothered to pull out.

And for me, that’s a source of struggle when I contemplate the issue of minimalism. Doing without piles of, say, cloth placemats in different patterns, or CDs no one listens to, or old high school notebooks, or any of the other things that people typically accumulate in their attics or basements is definitely a positive thing. But not having any family photos around? That seems sort of sad.

So next time we move, we might try the same thing, but this time I’m determined to find that box of wedding photos and other framed pictures and unpack that box early on. Minimalism is good, but living without sentimental objects seems a little too abstemious. I miss our photos and collectibles, and I look forward to seeing them again, whenever the next round of unpacking occurs.

 

Sparsely decorated

When a friend who is also a professional organizer sent me her e-newsletter today, I wasn’t surprised to see that the topic was reducing clutter. That’s a professional organizer’s bread-and-butter, after all; no one calls an organizer because they don’t have enough stuff.

Clutter, or, put more gently, the accumulation of material goods, is a topic of great interest to me. Just yesterday, I dropped by the home of a new acquaintance here in town, and we fell into an almost philosophical discussion about what we own and why. Her house had the same sparse ambience that mine does – sometimes I facetiously use the word “barren” to describe our decorating style, but the fact is that I just don’t like having a lot of things around. Both our current house and the one we moved out of a year ago featured semi-rural settings and lots of windows, so I like to say we use natural décor: instead of knick-knacks, we keep the focus on the tree branches and cloud formations and shadows that form ever-changing nature-centric tableaux just beyond our walls.

At the moment, we’re in the midst of a rather interesting experiment regarding material possessions. When we moved into our current home, it was intended to be a one-year rental, although we’ve since extended our lease another year. Nonetheless, exhausted from the process of packing up our last house and moving, my husband and children and I agreed that we were going to be in no hurry to unload everything we owned into this new house, especially if we’d be packing it all up again in just a few short months. We agreed that we would unpack what we needed – kitchenware, clothing, linens, office supplies, the kids’ favorite toys and books, electronics – and hold off on the rest until we could see what we missed. After a year, we figured, anything we hadn’t unpacked from the boxes in the garage were items we didn’t care about much anyway and probably didn’t need to have around.

After a few months in our new home, I began to realize that there were several bare surfaces on which we could display some of our favorite keepsakes. Finally one Saturday afternoon, I started digging through the boxes in search of just a few decorative items to put out: colored glass vases, ceramic pitchers, a couple of objets d’art I’d inherited from my grandparents and particularly treasured.

I located the items I had in mind and found places to display them, but in doing so, I found a lot of items I’d forgotten about as well: more vases and pitchers and other decorative items than I ever remember owning. Seeing some of them brought me a sense of bittersweet nostalgia; it seemed somehow sad that these much-loved pieces with which I’d once decorated my home had slipped out of my mind altogether in a year’s time.

I’m not sure exactly what it says about the more philosophical issue of our relationship to our belongings. Definitely, we don’t have a clutter problem. But, I sometimes wonder, do we have a sentimentality problem, if it’s so easy for us to live without personal items around the house?

On balance, our experiment in leaving boxes packed feels successful to me. After a year, I do know what I miss, and from that mental list, I’ll dig around in the storage boxes this weekend until I find them. Yes, by the standards of most households, we’re impressively clutter-free. But once in a while, I’m absolutely willing to let sentimentality take over and compel me to unearth some long-buried personal treasure that I can once again display and enjoy.

Extreme De-Cluttering: Yes, it's morbid, but it works for me

I love reading articles like this one from the Washington Post about housecleaning. I especially like reading about de-cluttering. It’s the lure of preaching to the converted, I realize. I’m good about anti-clutter. In fact, I’m almost to the other extreme. A new acquaintance visiting our house for the first time once used the word “barren.” I prefer to think of it as minimalist, or Shaker, but the fact remains that my spouse and I both favor clean, bare surfaces rather then clever arrangements of knickknacks.

But I still love reading decluttering tips. I always think maybe I’ll pick up yet another one that will make it even easier for me to keep picked up. And sometimes I do. In early January, I read an article that discussed the value of putting aside just fifteen minutes a day for little household projects rather than stockpiling them for a rainy day. “With fifteen minutes a day, you could finish 30 projects by the end of the month,” the article proclaimed. I didn’t keep count, but I did find it useful. Now I spend 15 minutes each month clipping out articles I’ve had published and putting them in plastic sleeves, one 15-minute session putting photos in my photo album, one 15-minute session each week entering credit card receipts into our electronic checkbook, and so forth.

I have one more de-cluttering tip to add to the list. I concede that it’s a little bit severe, but it has served me well. If you were to die suddenly, would you want someone else to have to deal with this particular mess?

The first time I remember thinking this way was one early evening when I was taking a run around our old neighborhood in Framingham. That neighborhood was full of smallish houses close to the street, and one day I happened to glance over and see what must have been a two-foot-high stack of dusty and faded folders piled lopsidedly against the window. I didn’t know anything about the house’s occupant, but at that moment the thought came so clearly to me: “Whoever those folders belong to is never going to sort through them or do anything productive with them. No one is going to touch those folders until their owner is dead and someone else is charged with cleaning out the space.”

Of course, I couldn’t have known this. Maybe the owner of the folders had every intention of sorting through them, or maybe they were the kind of records that you are supposed to keep for a prescribed amount of time and then discard. Even more likely, maybe the owner was nowhere close to his final years and would sort through them himself upon the occasion of moving out of the house, rather than dying.

Maybe. But for some reason, the sight of those folders had a lasting effect on me. Now, whenever I come across a pile of unsorted or out-of-use items in my own house, I ask myself the same thing: am I just leaving these here for some distant day when someone else has to decide what to do with them? Sometimes the answer is no, such as the kids’ school papers, which I store in paper bags but weed through occasionally to keep what I think best represents their work for any particular year and recycle the rest. Same with books: I might stockpile them for a few months, but then I pull out the ones I don’t want anymore and bring them up to the library’s yard sale. But other times I find items like clippings of travel stories on destinations I’d love to visit and think, “No; these could sit here forever.” And then I try to get rid of them.

If this was a sport, would we call it Extreme De-Cluttering? Probably. No doubt there are more upbeat ways of decluttering that don’t dwell on morbidity, but for me, this provides the last and best measure of what to keep and what to toss. And our closets, shelves and file drawers are a lot tidier because of it.

Giving thanks for...the kids' clutter (really!)

Having planned in the week leading up to Thanksgiving to count down the days in my blog by giving thanks for the various non-essential delights that grace my life, you’d think I’d be extra attuned this week to anything that might meet the criteria. The general idea is to go beyond what I call the massive things – the presence of family and friends; physical and mental health; food; shelter; freedom – and acknowledge the many other beloved everyday things that might not make it into a Thanksgiving toast.

But after I mentioned in another communication that due to an inexplicable failure of wireless connectivity in my home office I’ve been working today in my son’s room, at his little wooden desk, surrounded by his sports pennants and baseball cards, Twitter correspondent Jack Ferriter pointed out to me that there’s another item for my list of non-essential but wonderful things worthy of Thanksgiving week thanks: the clutter of toys and other paraphernalia that reflect my kids’ presence in the house.

Of course, when it comes time to pick up all their stuff, thankful is often the last thing I’m feeling (unless my inspiration for picking everything up off the floor is the imminent monthly arrival of the housecleaner, for which I always give thanks). But it’s true: our children’s beloved chotchkes remind us of their unique qualities, their hobbies, their passions, their idiosyncrasies. In Lionel Shriver’s mesmerizingly horrifying novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, one way Shriver conveys the character’s psychopathic tendencies is by describing the sterile tidiness of his childhood room, in which not a toy or game or stuffed animal or book mars the surface of the furniture or floor. This detail has stuck with me for years in its ability to imply a child’s chillingly un-childlike personality.

So when I view the clutter that follows my kids around like Pigpen’s dust cloud in Peanuts, I remind myself to feel grateful.

Along with the sports pennants on the wall and the baseball cards scattered across his desk, Tim’s most prized objects include his 10-year-old stuffed frog, Ba, and his newer but somewhat shabby gray elephant, Vicon. Both animals can usually be found draped across whatever chair or tabletop is nearest to Tim if he’s in the house; when he’s at school he leaves them on the mudroom bench so that he’ll see them as soon as he gets home. Tim also treasures the race numbers he collected at a series of road races he ran over the past two years as well as myriad baseball trophies and ribbons, and the coin collection his grandfather gave him, and a pile of baseball hats from every team he’s ever played on.

Holly’s clutter is a little less resonant with significance than Tim’s. Whereas Tim’s clutch of special belongings comprises things he’s had for a long time that are infused with special meaning to him, Holly just plain collects odds and ends, most of which she eventually uses in crafts projects (or plans to, anyway. Or so she says). Strewn across the rug in Holly’s room are beads of all sizes, straws, pipe cleaners, barrettes, recipe cards, paper clips, post-it notes. “Can I have that?!!” she pleads when I remove the disposable packaging from almost any grocery, whether it’s the cardboard carton that strawberries are packed in or the Styrofoam tray from a package of drumsticks. Kleenex boxes, cereal boxes, egg cartons: they all end up in Holly’s room. Last month I made pumpkin cupcakes for Halloween; now the unused cupcake papers are on her bookshelf. She loves to collect little odds and ends of all kinds. What isn’t to be used in a crafts project instead becomes a stand-in for a character in one of her imaginary play scenarios. One day she was engrossed in a game of imaginary school in the kitchen while I prepared dinner. I plucked a piece of dried macaroni that somehow hadn’t made it into the pot of boiling water with the others off the floor and threw it away. “Mom!” she gasped, horrified, “that’s the principal!”

So Jack Ferriter is right: their possessions, permanent and temporary, valuable and disposable, are all items to be thankful for, because these trinkets and chotchkes represent their personalities, for which I am always grateful. And if it sometimes seems that I spend a lot of time picking tiny beads out of the soles of my feet or dusting baseball trophies, I suppose it’s a small price to pay compared to the gratitude I feel for my unique and wonderful children.