‘Declutter Your Home … 20 ways to downsize or just clean up.” From time to time you read an article that raises your hackles, and this was one of them.
To begin with, neither you nor I are hoarders. There is no clutter in our homes.
I’ve occupied my home for nigh on to 50 years. When one of Mother’s third cousins died, it was arranged that I buy it from her estate because she wanted family living there. Her father and grandfather and great-uncle had lived there since Abraham Lincoln was in diapers.
When you move into a furnished house that has been inhabited by the same family for over 150 years, you don’t need to arrange the furniture. In that amount of time, reasonable people have pretty well figured out where chairs and tables belonged.
So there can be no clutter in a house that has been occupied since 1811. Anything not needed was thrown out back to rot into the ground with the buggies or burned in the Wood & Bishop cookstove years before.
Let’s evaluate some of the items listed in the offensive article.
• Your parents’ “love letters … Burn them.” Anyone addicted to historical society meetings knows that there is nothing more interesting than hearing someone read a letter that was written 150 years before. More often than not, the writer’s great-great-grandson is your distant cousin and is reading the letter.
• “Clothes.” I’m ashamed to say that I might have 20 shirts. My wife has helped widows clean out things, and many of the departed husbands were just my size. So I have a surfeit of shoes, jackets and shirts. How do you throw away something that your wife has just carted home?
• “Greeting cards … Throw them away.” In the barn is a suitcase full of Christmas cards that were sent to Capt. Freddie and Florence by all of the neighbors in our village. In the 1940s and ’50s it was the custom to exchange cards with all of the neighbors at Christmastime. These cards are signed “From Russ and Helen,” “From Joanna and Gus,” and should be preserved as part of the social history of our town.
• “Hand-me-down furniture … Consignment stores … They sell it and usually split it 30/70.” Want to guess who gets the 30? I don’t know if there is a stick of furniture in our home that we bought new. The bookcase I built at school in 1950 doesn’t count.
Does new furniture prove anything more than that you don’t know what to do with your extra money? Is a glider rocking chair any less comfortable today than it was 120 years ago? The handy little stand next to Marsha’s television chair came off the dump last summer.
• “Old appliances … Sell only to buyers who pay cash.” Sell anything and, at best, you’d get enough cash to buy a small bag of groceries. The last time I looked there was a 1920-something Maytag washer kicking around somewhere, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I have the manual that came with it. Next to it is a round copper washer that might be even older. Wouldn’t they be an asset in any Maine museum?
• “Old tennis racket.” Although I have never played tennis, I admit to buying a 50-cent tennis racket at a garage sale. It lives on the shelf beneath the rear window in my car. Just exhibiting a tennis racket in the rear window as I drive through Camden increases my perceived income by 300 or 400 percent.
• “Books … if you’re going to read it … put it on your bookshelf. If not, give it away.” It is true that you can now read most any book on the Internet. And they say that with the little portable computer tablet things, you can read any book in bed.
Some of us, however, are only really comfortable when we are surrounded by substantial shelves, crowded with the world’s great literature. How can you beat wandering into the library at 2 a.m. and then, after 15 minutes of Strindberg, drifting off into a calm and peaceful sleep?
• “China set … if you like it, use it. If you don’t, sell it.” We had an auction at our wedding where we sold several ancient plates that might well have been gifts from William R. Grace or Thomas Jefferson. After one of the kids took our finest set of antique china, she realized that the plates contained lead, so she wouldn’t want to eat out of them, anyway.
• Antiques. “Take high-end antiques to a local antiques dealer, who can take them to an auction house.”
What are antiques? Nowadays you can put antique plates on a car that was made in 1990. In our home, comfortable old Boston or Lincoln rockers do not constitute clutter. Would you sell a 150-year-old cherry drop-leaf table and use the money to buy a pressed wood Chinese replacement that was glued together with formaldehyde?
Not everyone thinks in terms of preserving a bit of tangible Americana for the younger generations who take flush toilets, refrigerators and telephones for granted. Even my beloved wife, Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, would burn the letters her great-great-grandfather wrote to his bride the day he held Grant’s horse at Appomattox Courthouse.
Indeed, she and her daughter have their eye on a 1919 Pierce-Arrow windshield in the barn and, upon my demise, are intending to bring in Mike Wolfe and “American Pickers.”
The humble Farmer can be seen on Community Television in and near Portland and visited at his website:
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