The Swedes have a word and, I guess, a concept that we don't have in English—döstädning: dö (death), städning (cleaning): death cleaning, downsizing so your children won't be burdened with your stuff after you die. I thought that's what I was doing when I started cleaning out the entry closet last week, but now I think I was just wanting to be able to walk into it again.
Basically, I don't have a lot of "stuff" in my house, though I did in the entry closet. Most of it was memorabilia that, sentiment aside, wasn't worth keeping, although when I found a box of puppets my son and I had made when he was small, I gasped with delight. What characters we had created! And the puppet shows we performed with them! But the cloth faces were dirty and the gourd faces had been chewed by insects and the sock dragon had lost teeth, and so on. Out they went. I boxed the good ones to donate to a school, and, yeah, okay, I kept a few, too.
When I was cleaning off the shelf of games, I found cards for a game Ela and I had been making up when he was still learning how to write. It was going to be a literary board game. I don't remember what the start and end squares were, but the cards were delightful: "You dropped your golden ball into the well. Go back 2 steps." "The tortoise wins the race. Go forward 8 steps." We must have been reading Robin Hood stories and Arthurian tales at the time because a lot of cards reference those stories: "Arthur pulls sword out of stone. Advance to any intersection." "Little John fights Robin Hood on bridge and knocks him off. Go back 3 steps." The game was never completed, but the cards are too fun and hold too many memories to be tossed. I put them back on the shelf.
I also kept the Alice in Wonderland chess set Ela made from Sculpty clay–Alice as the Queen, mushrooms as castles, lobsters as pawns, and so on. I don't play chess, but I love these playful chess pieces.
I don't think I'll do any more beading and I don't paint any more, so why keep the equipment? It wasn't hard to give away such things, or to toss paint that had dried up and children's books that won't have any more readers in my house. I tore the hardback covers off books too ragged to give away and recycled the paper. I don't know if children read books these days, but I took the books I liked best to the Goodwill. They had probably come from the Goodwill in the first place. And I kept the ones with the most sentimental attachment, either for me or for Ela. I'll probably never read The Little Colonel's Hero again, but looking at it gives me a warm feeling from my childhood, and maybe, after I die, Ela will feel the same way about finding the Dr. Seuss and Richard Scary books I used to read to him.
Still, I got rid of a lot of stuff. Here's a picture of the second carload to go to the transfer station and the Goodwill, as well as a couple of elegant jackets and other special things I'm offering on Jo's List at a good price.
I found the architectural plans for my house and thought why should I keep them now that the house was built? But I was unsure, so I asked my son. He said they had important information about the house and that I should keep them. That made me uneasy. What if I had thrown out something important? What if I threw out sentimental stuff that Ela would have enjoyed seeing again?
No matter. What's done is done. And it feels good, now, to walk into the entry closet and see all those half-empty shelves. It feels like a good way to start the new year.
