Slightly Off the Grid

My daughter just moved into a new house. Empty kitchen drawers await spoons and spatulas and plastic wrap. There is no junk in any junk drawer. Her bedroom closet has an organizer system so massively amazing that even the painter stopped to gape at it. It seems impossible that she and her husband could ever own enough clothes to fill it.

The new house is a clean slate.

The old house has a dumpster in the driveway for everything they chose not to bring to the new house. They lived in that house almost ten years. With three children. A dumpster was a good idea.

Hubby and I have been in our house twenty-six years. We, too, moved in to ample empty drawers and cabinets. And children. There was enough space for anything you could imagine.

Until there wasn’t.

Every single storage area in our house needs a restart. How do I decide where to start when every single drawer and cupboard is an issue?

I tackle what bothers me most.

Last week I cleaned out a certain kitchen cupboard because every time I opened the door, a bag of dried cranberries fell out on to me. I tossed six half-used bags of marshmallows (every bonfire needs a fresh bag, ya know) and jars of home-grown-and-dried herbs going back ten years. I still have a dozen different flavors of teas, though, for those rare moments when I don’t want coffee, which is increasingly rare since I got a Nespresso for Christmas.

The Nespresso was the impetus to clean out a different kitchen cabinet. There was no place to store it. Well, there is a place to store it, but two twenty-year-old coffee urns were sitting there. Any event I host from here on out that requires two coffee urns will also require a caterer who can supply his or her own urns. Just saying. Plus, I have a Nespresso. Goodbye, coffee urns.

The Nespresso maker was joined by a new set of mugs. That means I must purge the mismatched mugs. Even—gasp—the ones with sentimental attachment. Not the teacher mugs, though. I purged them long ago.

My husband got a medical device for testing his blood but was leaving it on the desk in our bedroom. Why not put it in the desk in our bedroom? Because there were no empty drawers. So the desk got cleaned out because we did not need church session notes from 1998. Really. Not even as an historical curiosity. They weren’t that interesting. Now the blood testing device has a handy drawer to sit in, except for the five minutes a week it gets used.

So, basically, as new stuff comes into the house, old stuff must go. One daughter figured this out years ago as a strategy to manage her mother-in-law’s overactive Christmas giving. Her house is smaller than mine, so she ran out of space quicker. Lucky for her.

A clothing drive motivated me to weed my husband’s closet of perfectly good clothes that he never wears. The horrible clothes that he likes to wear but would not be worthy of a homeless person, those got tossed. It really opened up the closet. But that was three months ago and I swear the tees and sweats are multiplying, although no new ones have entered the house. The closet is still full.

And that’s a real kicker. I want to declutter a space and have it done. Done, I tell you. But empty space is a magnet for stuff. It’s a never ending process.

Swedish Death Cleaning is supposed to be a decluttering so that your loved ones aren’t left to the burden when you’re gone. But if the clutter keeps happening, then you can never die.

God help me.

My loved ones will just have to hope I leave a clear path to my body.

My daughter will rent a dumpster.