The Great Purge Part 1

We bought our house almost ten years ago. Dick was still in the last years before retirement from corporate life and I was still teaching in the final years of my graduate studies. But we were thinking about retirement and planning to move back to my home town when the time was right. Then our house came on the market and even though the time wasn't right, we recognized it as home.

The move took two years, and it wasn't tidy. We made the four-hour drive between the two houses nearly every weekend, always with a car load of stuff. We did little of that sort-through-and-throw-away that we should have done. We moved it all. And on our trips down the 200 miles of I-55, we passed through some great antiquing territory. And since our new house was a three story Victorian, well . . .

I wonder if that’s how it usually is in transition spaces. You have the detritus from the old and the gathering necessaries of the new.

Even transitions as quotidian as the changing seasons bring stuff. There’s the sweater that should have been thrown away at the end of last winter. Plus the pretty new sweater you just bought. On sale!

Every new season of life leaves clutter from the last. The more seasons to your life, the more clutter. For instance, bicycles.

I have a "city" bike that I bought years ago. 

At some point, I didn't feel safe trying to balance with such a high bar. 
I replaced it with a lower bar girl's bicycle 

When swinging my leg over even the lower bar became too difficult for my arthritic hip, 

I replaced the girl's bicycle with a special, step-through, easy-boarding bicycle. 

So far, so good. But that makes two bicycles I’ll never ride again, one in the basement, one in the garage. Somebody could use those bicycles, I tell myself every time I see them. 

And to make things worse, we now have a lot of undesignated space that makes it way too tempting to bypass difficult decisions.

                                     Me: What is this?

                                     He: I don’t know.

                                     Me: Do we need it?

                                     He: Maybe.

                                     Me: What for?

                                     He: It might go on something.

                                     Me: OK. I’ll put it on the third floor
                                                          . . . (down in the basement)
                                                          . . . (in the east bedroom) 
                                                          . . . (back in the drawer). 

It weighs on me. I like things tidy. True, I don’t have to go up to the third floor or down in the basement and I rarely go in the east bedroom. But I know that stuff is there. I smell the cardboard packing boxes.

So the purge is on. We’ve started. I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, I'm off to Paris!!! Who knows what I'll bring back.