Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
Quality or quantity?
Jan and I are in our seventies. That means we have lived a long time and managed to accumulate a fair amount of stuff. We have moved from state to state twice in the last six years. Each time we got ready to move we “downsized” by having an estate sale and by giving furniture away. This last move required a true review of what we have because we were going to move into a one bedroom condo.
Even so, we have a storage locker downstairs that is full of boxes. I can’t tell you what’s in most of those boxes. They haven’t been opened since May of 2018 when we returned to St. Louis. To me that means their contents can’t be that important and much of it should be removed from our lives. Jan and I don’t see eye to eye on this solution so, like any other untouchable subject, we just don’t talk about it. However, I see the stuff every day because my parking spot is right in front of the storage space.
Our clothes closets are full of more wearables than we will ever need. Part of my issue is that I have a wardrobe of different sized clothing to account for my tendency to lose and gain weight. Jan has some beautiful clothes left over from her working days. When we moved from New Mexico, she gave a generous amount of business attire to a program that helps women find employment, and be interviewed and hired.
I have had several episodes when I frantically purged stuff from my home. I get into a certain mood and I’m off and running, determined to get rid of what I am not using. As a result, I have pitched things that I later regretted. Once my son took me to task because I threw away a bunch of letters from my parents, written to their family members when they were living in India, back in the 40’s. Ted never got to meet my parents since they both died at a young age, so he felt that those letters were a part of his history. He is right. But, once gone, there is no retrieving what has been dumped into a garbage truck.
When I was a student nurse doing my home health rotation I was assigned to a lady who lived in South St. Louis city. My instructions were to help her with a bath. I did not know what I was walking into. She lived in a small two story house, and had long lost the ability to navigate steps. She lived on the first floor. I was caught off guard when I entered her house – the whole first floor was a maze built of newspapers, magazines, and advertisement pages. She literally had a path to the kitchen and one to the bathroom through the waist high piles of paper.
I wondered if she had any family that was worried about the fire hazard in that house, or the clutter that she could fall over. I made the mistake of asking her if she needed help to clean up the paper, to which she replied that it was all important things and she couldn’t possible get rid of any of it. Her tone of voice told me not to bring this up again. I wondered what frightened her so much that she had to surround herself with barriers, as if the stacks were protecting her from something. I have since learned that hoarders are plagued by fear that they may need the items at a future time. Hoarding is also associated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Anxiety, and Depression.
Jan and I are not hoarders, but we do have too much stuff. I think about the burden on my kids when something happens to the two of us and they have to clean out our house. I don’t want to do that to them!