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.

Letters in a box

I’m on a mission to clean out our attic this month. From end to end, I plan to go through every single box – clothes, toys, books, art supplies, retired electronics, sports equipment – until I’ve sorted or purged or re-classified every last item. With the possible exception of my grandmother’s wedding dress, no more items will be allowed to wile away their days up below the eves unless they can justify their existence to me with a specific purpose.

But then I opened a box that brought me to a screeching halt. It was full of letters. More specifically, letters I’d received from friends between approximately the date of my high school graduation and my early 20’s. Letters from my college years, for the most part.

Some were from high school friends. Others were from friends I met during a summer-long European exchange program. A few were letters my college friends wrote to me while we were all off on summer break.

I read just one and then couldn’t bring myself to read any more of them. And now I don’t know what to do with them. Keep them even though I don’t expect to do any further re-reading? Stuff them into an even darker corner of the attic and let my children puzzle over their purpose decades from now? Or heft them with one good toss into the recycling bin at the transfer station?

It’s not that the letters represented any particularly bad memories. The opposite, really: those were good friends writing to me about generally great times. I was very happy during my college years, and for the most part I was every bit as aware then as I am now of how lucky I was to have so many contacts across the globe with whom to share thoughts and memories. I’m certain that every single one of those letters was a welcome sight in my mailbox. So why am I so resistant to look at them now?

Just that it was a different part of my life, one that I don’t really feel the need to revisit. The letter I opened was from a close high school friend who wrote to me during a study break her sophomore year in college, complaining about how difficult it was for her to get along with a mutual friend of ours and how much her boyfriend had let her down in the moral support department. It was hard to read even though there was nothing terribly serious about the situation she was describing. Even at the time she wrote it, she would have said it was mildly troublesome and not hugely problematic. Nonetheless, it resonated with me, and not in a particularly welcome way. Friends disappoint you when you’re in your late teens, but they do when you’re in your forties also. Maybe what was hard about it was not feeling like I could look back and say “Boy, have we changed! What a learning experience all of that was!” Habits and personality traits set in when we are teenagers, or even earlier, and remain with us as we settle into middle age, and in a way that’s what those letters seemed to be telling me.

Somewhat cosmically, the days that followed the discovery of the box seemed to be full of references to letters. A woman in her late 70’s asked me to help her draft a memoir based on letters her husband sent her when he was serving military duty overseas. A couple in their early 40’s whom I interviewed for an article laughed about the letters they sent each other as college students – “Back when people still wrote letters!” they remarked. And it’s true: my children will probably never have a box full of letters from their friends, unless they choose to print all their emails and text messages.

For now, I’ll keep this box of letters. Maybe someday I’ll feel more dispassionate about the emotions of the past and find it more amusing than disquieting to read through them. Maybe my children will find them interesting, though unlike the situation with the woman who showed me her husband’s letters from overseas, I don’t think they reveal much about American culture or history. They’re just the tale of my friends and me, having the same kinds of jokes, misunderstandings, bonding experiences and uncertainties about our lives that we do now.

So maybe that will seem useful at some point. Until then, back they go under the eaves, where they are welcome to stay, unlabeled, unclassified, and for the time being, untouched.

Holly culls her wardrobe

Holly went on a clothes-purging spree Sunday night.

On the one hand, this is better for me than a clothes-buying spree, which is more typical of what she usually does if given the opportunity. On the other, I was a little shocked by how many items ended up in the giveaway pile as she tore through her bureau drawers. When she was done, it appeared to me she’d kept about one-third of what she owns and opted to get rid of the other two-thirds.

I have to admit that I could see the method in her madness. As I’ve bemoaned many times over the past year, both in print and to any listening ear, both of my kids now limit their everyday wardrobes to about three or four different items per season. Holly started third grade wearing the same hoodie every single day and insisting that there was nothing unsanitary about it since she changed the t-shirt underneath daily. Much as I struggled to change that habit, it ended up that Mother Nature came to my aid: once we reached late autumn and it was chillier, Holly started wearing long-sleeved shirts and didn’t like the way the hoodie felt over those shirts, so she gave it up. But that only led to the problem that she was rotating among just three or four favorite long-sleeved shirts, and two or three pairs of pants.

Meanwhile, her bureau drawers were stuffed with other items I hoped she’d eventually be tempted by: colors (such as pink) that she claims not to like anymore; styles (such as straight-legged jeans) she says she finds uncomfortable; dresses that she says are too dressy. “My style is stylish but sloppy,” she informed me. “I don’t like clothes that make me look all neat and put together.”

Oh sure, who would ever want to look neat and put together? Well, me, for one. But as I’ve learned more times than I can possibly count over my twelve and a half years of parenting, our children are different people from us. And considering the genetics, who knew that any daughter of mine could ever hope to have any kind of defined style whatsoever – even one defined as “stylish but sloppy”?

Several of the garments Holly put in the discard pile were old favorites that she accurately recognized she’s begun to outgrow, but others were pretty dresses that she just isn’t interested in wearing. And somehow she’s managed to intuit the same closet-weeding rule that many of us have to tell ourselves over and over again: “If I haven’t worn it in the past year, why do you think I’m suddenly going to decide I like it?” she asked me.

Well, because tastes change as you grow up, and you’re growing up really fast, I wanted to tell her. Sure, that floral sundress from Talbot’s Kids might not appeal to you for right now, but starting in fourth grade, you’re going to have to dress up for the semiannual school concerts, and that dress would be perfect.

But at the same time, dresses for young girls really aren’t that expensive, and it will be fun to pick one out together when that time arrives.

In a way, I’m still conflicted. Two of my friends who heard about Holly’s wardrobe purge were impressed. “That's a good thing! Too many choices and options are what cause stress, so narrow it all down to the necessary basics!” my friend Desa said.

And I know she’s right: Holly is executing on a habit that many of us adults are still trying to develop. It’s true that if she needs something she doesn’t have – a concert dress, a pair of pink tights, a white cotton cardigan – I can buy it for her. At the same time, it’s not a very positive message in terms of conservation of resources to approve of her getting rid of things we might just end up replacing.

But the bottom line is that she’s developing a good habit by learning to cut down. “Gotta love a kid who learns the skill of de-cluttering early on. I'm still working on developing that in myself,” my friend Kathleen observed. So I won’t stand in Holly’s way. This morning, I scheduled a pickup from Big Brother Big Sister, which accepts clothing donations. If her tastes change in the near future, we’ll restock her wardrobe. Until then, we’ll just enjoy the sight of neat, almost bare shelves and closet racks, as Holly continues to wear her three or four favorite seasonal outfits.

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.

Fall decluttering and clean-up time

We spent a lot of time this weekend tidying the house. What a sense of relief it brings. We do this every few months, and each time I wonder why it’s so hard to just keep it this way. We wouldn’t have to go into such a frenzy every few months if we could just maintain.

And yet it’s so hard to do. I know we’re not the only household struggling with clutter. In fact, ours is minimal compared to some – but that’s all the more reason we ought to be able to stay on top of it. This weekend we tackled every single upstairs room plus the dreaded paperwork basket in the kitchen. Now every surface is clear, every book and toy and game put away in its place, every piece of clothing folded or hung. For now.

Each of us has our own particular tidiness pitfall, I’ve noticed. Holly is the worst, but as Rick and I both acknowledge, it really is the flip side of her endearing creativity. Holly is always up to her elbows in projects and imaginary games, each of which requires a complicated inventory of props. The pile of shredded paper on the floor? That’s the money from when she was playing Farmers Market. The array of books on the treadmill? She was a teacher hosting a visit from a famous author who came to talk to her class of (imaginary) first graders. The jumble of barrettes and jewelry on the rug? The remnants of last weekend’s spa game, when she and Samantha bathed and groomed their stuffed animals. Yes, she makes a mess wherever she goes – but it’s so hard for me to discourage her from any of her pretending or games. And as for making clean-up part of the process as she plays…it makes sense, but it’s just so hard to enforce.

Tim doesn’t play imaginary games or anything much at all; he’s usually either reading or using his computer during his leisure time. So there’s no clutter of toys trailing in his wake. With him, it’s clothes. He sheds clothes and leaves them in piles on the floor, and his bureau drawers are always mysteriously stuffed to the gills, making it difficult to put things away quickly. It’s not like he wears such a wide variety of clothes; his drawers just fill up with an accumulation of baseball pants, t-shirts, sweatshirts, until there’s no room for anything. And once he’s done his homework, practiced his trumpet and taken a shower, I often don’t have the heart to insist that he wrestle his clean clothes back into his bureau drawers. But I know I should.

For me, it’s paperwork. Clippings to file in my portfolio, invitations awaiting an RSVP, receipts to enter into our electronic checkbook, catalogs to peruse, letters and forms from the kids’ school, notices from church. I’ve read so many books on how to stay on top of clutter, and almost all of them have a chapter devoted to paperwork, but so far none of the techniques have stuck. I sort and pile, sort and pile, and the papers never seem to go anywhere.

Rick is the most well-rounded member of the family regarding mess. He leaves socks around, but not other articles of clothing. He leaves drinking glasses near his computer and bowls of sunflower seeds by the TV. He reads the newspaper and never remembers to bring it out to the recycling. No single category: a little of this, a little of that.

And then every few months, both of us throw ourselves into clearing it all up.
I always feel so relieved and so rejuvenated when we’re done. Right now, I look around the house – my office, the kids’ rooms, the mudroom – and see tidily arranged items and clean surfaces. It brings me such peace of mind that I cannot explain why I then let it lapse. Over the summer, I interviewed a feng shui expert for an article I was writing. “The first step in feng shui is to declutter,” she said, and then went on to describe all the subsequent steps: the ones for welcoming in positive energy, repelling negativity, and so forth. I couldn’t help thinking that for me, step one would be enough: just give me the decluttering and all the rest, the positive energy, the absence of stress, the peace of mind, will follow.

So for the next few days, I have just that: serenity and mental peace. My house is neat, and tomorrow our house cleaner comes to do the cleaning part of it. I will celebrate the serenity and remind myself every evening to maintain the tidiness. I’ll start with trying to keep the floors clear of clutter, and work my way up vertically. And maybe I’ll reform this family yet.