Decluttering and Curating Memories
in All Saints
This discussion was created from comments split from: Working towards a tidy house.
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@mark_in_manchester , judging by the number of lists of box contents around the place at the moment, I suspect Mr Nen is making an inventory even if he is not researching current prices. I also know the person to get in contact with should I be the one left with the classic car projects. The rest would probably end up in the hands of Garage Clearance. Mr Nen knows this.
Alongside all the actual sorting, my mind is much occupied with how to manage things going forward. I know how it has happened - we have been married for 40 years and have lived in this family home for 26 years with busy lives, work, child-raising - but we cannot continue to carry all this Stuff along with us for the rest of our lives. I'm feeling the burden of it and I don't want our children to feel similarly burdened.
I am also challenged about how to curate certain sentimental things. I want to honour the memories by keeping what's appropriate without it being too much. A recent example: I have a file of keepsakes from Nenlet2's wedding last summer. I want to keep them and to honour the occasion; but it is all in a file that will end up in a box or on a shelf. Nenlet1, on the other hand, has put the invitation, a couple of photos and the little place cards with their names on them in a frame which is on a shelf in their lounge. They see it every day. We see it when we visit. It's lovely; a much better way of preserving the memories. Why didn't I think of it?
This morning I was dismantling a picture display in one of our bedrooms that I put up for the GrandNenling to look at during nappy changes when the little family came here for Christmas in 2023 (yes, it's been there ever since
This is no doubt a subject for a different thread.
I have lots of stuff I lump together as memorabilia. I know I can get it out and it will bring back memories- but how often do I do that? When I look at things I cannot bear to part with any of it, lest I lose the memory too.
Most of it is personal: the scrapbook my mum helped me make, aged 9, my school needlework bag with its sample stitches and seams, cards for many occasions, photos, family events, school trips, holiday brochures.
Mr P famously said, when I tried to get him to prune some of his possessions, “You get rid of my stuff and you get rid of me” . Well since he died I have had to get rid of almost all his stuff, books, office stuff, collectibles of many sorts, including clocks, old radios, hi fi, tools….There is scarcely anything of his left. It feels almost as if he never lived here.
Yes, worthy of another thread.
Maybe that's a good thing - to have a new chapter somewhere different where we make new memories without forgetting the old ones, and being grateful for them. I read a comment somewhere on a decluttering video on YouTube (I am much better at watching other people cleaning and decluttering than doing it myself) that said, "You can't embrace tomorrow if your arms are full of yesterday."
ETA: Nenlet1 seems to have a much better attitude to Stuff. She had left a couple of boxfuls here when she got married 13 years ago. In the sort-out here I asked her if she wanted any of it. She said, "If I haven't wanted it in 13 years I can't want it, Mum, but if I see it I will want it." So she asked me to go through it, send her a picture of anything I really thought she might want and discard the rest. We kept (for ourselves) a piece of artwork that she did for her Art "A" level and the planning workbook that went with it (which she said she would have kept if we hadn't) and everything else went.
Books have a particular pull for me - when clearing my mum's house we brought back quite a number, but a lot went to charity shops and others were discarded. Throwing my mum and dad's books into the skip at the recycling centre was a particular low point. And going through the ones here: I'd kept quite a lot of children's books because of the sentimental pull and now we have a grandchild of course I want to have some for when she visits. But I weeded out the ones that were really discoloured or damaged and that felt a bit brutal, when it was books I remembered my own reading... with their names written in the front in a childish hand...
What do other people do, and think?
There is a box file of photographs & documents relating mostly to my mother's family, and a few from my father's. These are willed to my niece, as my sons have shown no interest in my side of the family tree, the stories on the paternal side being more interesting to boys, and a subject Mr RoS like to talk about at any opportunity.
Somehow I have to get round digitising them, making some photo books of the special ones and getting rid of the rest. It was going to be a winter job but now here we are in Spring. 🤔
My son says that the list will give him something to read while he's chucking the lot into a skip.....
Anything clean and readable I donate to the Oxfam bookshop in a nearby town. But I do put books in the wood-burner. It seems a more honourable death than putting them in the paper skip, somehow. Illogical, I know.