Letting Go

 

I have a walnut tree in view just outside the kitchen window.  It is bare now, except two lonely walnuts, side by side, refusing to fall.  It’s been about a week since I noticed them, and I’m wondering how long they are going to hang on and why.  I don’t know whether to admire their tenacity or despair at their unwillingness to let go. 

When it comes to possessions, letting go can lead to freedom.  Holding on too hard to things can tie you down – just watch an episode of Hoarders to see where it can lead!  Most people do not go to that extreme.  The other extreme are those people who get rid of everything, keeping only the barest essentials and living in a barren house.   I don’t think I would like that any better than living like those hoarders.

I am still in the process of settling into a new old house, combining two households of stuff.  The house I left was my home for almost fifty years.  The house I moved into has been occupied by my family for about 150 years.  So, basically, I have 200 years’ worth of stuff to deal with.  And much of it is soaked with memories.  

My great-great grandfather built this old house

An old house clings to its past, refusing to allow its  owner to get rid of its mementos.  Luckily I have a large house, with room for memories and a love for history.  And I’m thankful for ancestors who felt the same way.

Oddly enough, some of the hardest things to let go are the mundane, the little things.  I have a little box of shells.  I’m not even sure where they came from.  But I can’t bring myself to throw them away. I mean, someone collected them from a beach somewhere, at some time.  They picked each one up, looked it over and put it in a pocket or a bag and brought it back home.  And here I am, not interested at all in shells, but reluctant to let them go.  They are in a rather large box of stuff labeled “Misc stuff” with other stuff I can’t figure out whether to keep or not.  Every now and then I take out that box and go through it, looking at everything and trying to decide what to do with it.  Then I put it all back in the box, close the flaps and put in back in the closet.

My mother kept, apparently, ever card she ever received.  I inherited that trait, at least in part.  So I have many boxes of cards – holidays, birthday, wedding, anniversary, and others.  Some of them go back to my baby days.  I sorted through a lot of them when I moved into the house and they now inhabit two shelves in a spare closet.  There are other mementos – horse show ribbons, pictures of every litter of puppies and kittens ever born on this place, postcards, pretty calendars.  No one else would want them and I can’t just throw them away.  The only things that disappear in this house are things that might be valuable – like my baseball card collection.  The last time I saw them, they were in my old bedroom closet.  They are nowhere to be found.  I know I didn’t throw them away and I know my mother wouldn’t have, so it is a mystery that will never be solved.

I can’t tell you how many books and articles I have read on getting rid of clutter.  They all had different methods, but basically the bottom line was to let go of a lot of stuff.  If I could do that, I wouldn’t need the books.  One of the most recent methods I read about was the one where you are supposed to pick up everything you own and decide if it brings you joy.  If I picked up everything in all ten rooms of this house, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting rid of anything because I would be 100 years old and somebody else would be worrying about what to keep.  Just the books alone would take a lifetime, because of course I would have to re-read each one to decide if it brought me joy.  And then I would have to listen to every CD, album, and cassette tape.  Listening to the cassette would probably involve tracking down a working cassette player, which just goes to show you that you can’t get rid of everything because then you will need it for sure.  Then there are all the DVDs and videos I have collected.  Watching them again would be a life’s work.  Maybe I could listen to music and read at the same time, but then I wouldn’t be sure if it were the music or the books bringing me joy and I would have to start over.  Then there would be the pictures!  I’m not clear on whether you would have to pick up each individual picture and decide or if you could just pick up a whole group to assess.   But to do that I would have to sort and organize them and after I invested that much work, I think I would have to keep them.  It’s a really good thing I am in this big house.  I can see all kinds of pitfalls in this joy method.  I mean, how much joy is enough?  Does it have to send thrills down your spine?  Or just mild contentment? 

The kitchen would be easiest.  Nothing much in there brings me actual joy.  But I think I have to have dishes and pots and pans and my trusty cast iron skillets.  And my crock pot.  It doesn’t bring joy, exactly, but it makes cooking bearable.  I have two crock pots.  I have a normal sized one and a small one.  I saw the small one and thought that would be handy for making meals for one person.  It would be handy, except I have yet to find a crock pot recipe that doesn’t make large quantities of food, way to large for a one-quart container.  I have not found any way to make a small amount of soup, for instance.  I think the only thing I’ve ever made in my handy little crock pot is cocktail weinies in barbeque sauce once or twice.

 I’ve already discarded most of the things in the kitchen that brought me misery.  I am ruthless with those.  Like the waffle iron.  Speaking of waffles, I was looking through a new catalog today.  They had several waffle irons that make waffles in different shapes.  There was one that made little hearts.  Why would you want a whole waffle iron just to make hearts?  Wouldn’t you get tired of little heart waffles and wish for just some normal sized square waffles?  But then you would have to have two waffle irons cluttering up your counter space.   I turned the page and there was another version that made little waffle cars and trucks.  And another that makes waffle legos.  There was a picture with it of a little building built of the waffle legos, with strawberries around it. (I think they were real strawberries, but there might be a waffle iron that makes strawberry waffles.) Does anybody really buy these things?  And make waffle legos and cars and trucks?   Maybe you could make both and build little buildings with the lego waffles in which to park the little waffle cars and trucks.  I can only imagine what a mess someone like me could make with that.  If I want waffles, I just go to Waffle House.

I’ve been to many estate auctions over the years and wondered at some of the things I’ve seen there.  So, I think I’ll just keep all this stuff and let someone, someday marvel at what I’ve kept.  Maybe someone will want that little box of shells.

Postscript:  This morning I looked at my walnut tree and discovered that only one walnut remains.