Friday: Thoughts on Decluttering

All the junk has now gone to the rubbish tip and there is just a bit more organising and freecycling to do in the garage. Much of what we cleared out was child related - toys, games, and things left over from our homeschooling days (we stopped homeschooling 13 year ago!). Now TG is 14 it was more than time to get rid of all this, but doing so was bittersweet after 25 years of having young(ish) children. Quite a bit of it was stacked up in the living room before it was taken to the charity shops, and each time I passed there was a pang of sadness to see everything go. In reality, it was nothing to do with the Stuff itself, it was all about the memories. The pink Early Learning Centre toy cash register that TG loved ... or the Hama beads that all three girls spend hours and hours using (only to then spend days nagging me to iron them and fuse the pictures together!) ... or the Pop to the Shops game that TG adored (which replaced another Shopping Game that H obsessed on to the point where we got rid of it because we couldn't bear the thought of starting all over again with TG!) ... or the outgrown chemistry set, because TG is now old enough for real labs ... and so on. 

Of course, getting rid of the Stuff doesn't mean getting rid of the memories, and in any case most of it hadn't seen the light of day for years. Some things had come from charity shops in the first place, and it was well past time to send it on for use by other families. We were also able to pass on TG's collection of Sylvanian families toys to the six year old girl next door, to her great excitement. We kept some timeless toys for any future grandchildren - Lego (not sets, just a large box of bricks and bits into which any sets long ago merged), a box of Duplo, a Playmobil toddler train set, and our large collection of Playmobil. 

I suspect we still kept too much. Inside I long to be minimalist, and just keep what I truly need or love, but it is still hard to get rid of things that might be useful. H was a star, and kept asking when I last used things - if the answer was a blank stare or waffle, out it went! Our medium term plan is that when TG finishes school in four years we will sell our house and buy somewhere smaller. It has been a wonderful family home, with plenty of space for five of us - even in lockdown we had four adults and a teenager here without feeling we were under each others feet - but when it becomes just myself and M plus TG in university holidays, and then eventually just the two of us, it will be far to large for our needs. At that point we intend to be utterly ruthless in getting rid of anything we rarely use, or which isn't much loved. Partly to be sure that when we move to a smaller space we actually use it for living in, not as a storage facility for Stuff; also partly so that our daughters will not be faced in future with having to deal with a house full of Stuff when we are gone or incapable of doing it ourselves.The garage declutter has been a good start, but there is still a lot else that need to go. R took everything of hers when she moved out, H will do the same, and TG's stuff is confined to her room. M is naturally tidy and not an accumulator of Stuff, so I'm afraid most of the rest is down to me.  

This evening we went to visit friends. They don't have a garden, but at the beginning of lockdown they took on an allotment (a kind of community garden divided into individual plots). They are mostly using it to grow veg but also have a small grassy area, so we bought fish and chips and sat there to eat them and chat. Part of northern England has been put under a restriction which bans people from different households meeting in each others houses, but with one brief exception we have stuck to socialising outdoors even though we are technically allowed to visit indoors. In winter when it is too cold to sit out, I doubt we will be socialising in person much at all unless we go for walks. Today was a very hot day but the weather changed in the evening and became cloudy with occasional drops of rain. It ended with a spectacular sunset and a red rainbow - the colours were altered by the sunset and only the red spectrum was visible.