1.

I heard a story about friends of friends who decided to downsize into a condo. They’d raised their family in the same house without ever moving, so the place was packed with all manner of everything, including boxes they hadn’t opened in years. It took them five or six months to sort through it, taking carloads of recycling to the depot and holding three garage sales. 

Finally they’d pared it down to their favorite possessions, the useful and beautiful ones, things they needed and things couldn’t bear to part with. Then the real estate agent came in and staged the house, re-purposing a couple of rooms, getting them all painted, and afterward bringing in new sofas and lamps to mix with the best of the family furnishings to create a sleek new interior 

When it was finished, the couple came back and walked around silently. Finally one said to the other, “Why didn’t we do this years ago? Then we could have enjoyed it ourselves.”

This is one of the informally crowdsourced tips that’s helping me purge large amounts of stuff from our house. They’re things you tend not to read about in manuals, in Swedish death-cleaning guides or the joy-holding Kondo books. Instead, it’s one of the stories I’ve heard about other people’s experiences that’s shaped my own approach to simplifying our lives. 

I’m going to run through the stories here, and maybe some of them will speak to you, too.

1.5

We’re not planning to move, but before hearing about the friends of friends, I hadn’t thought beyond the paring-down stage of purging to picture what we’d be left with. Once I did, I began to picture other changes we could roll into the process. 

For one thing, my husband and I discussed repurposing a couple of rooms on the second floor the way the real estate agent had done, even though we loathe the word repurposing. On days when he’s tired, my husband’s MS can make it hard to transfer between the devices he uses to get around: the motorized wheelchair he rides outside and on the main floor, the manual wheelchair waiting on the second floor and the stairlift he uses to travel between them.

Maybe we could create a sitting room on the second floor so family and friends could come upstairs for visits and save him a few transfers. Put in some seating, bring in the TV. We decided to set it up in the biggest room, the former main bedroom, which my husband was using as his study. At the same time, his study could be swapped into the middle bedroom, more recently known as the TV room. 

As a first step, I moved everything portable down to the basement and did a thorough spring cleaning. Afterward, our son and a friend came over and spent an afternoon moving furniture and electronics around, meanwhile getting rid of old devices and cables. When they were done, I spent a few more days painting the walls and polishing the floors. 

Once it was all finished, the rooms looked so clean and elegant it was easy not to bring everything back upstairs and re-create the clutter. Instead, we chose what we needed and loved from the stuff I’d put in the basement and prepared the rest for recycling.

2.

A friend doing a purge told me he’d made a big mistake. 

“Don’t do the photos first. There are too many decisions to make, and it’s too emotional. You get bogged down in pictures of your kids and it takes forever. I should have saved them for last.”

On the other hand, my Aunt Marg told me a story about culling photographs taken by her husband, who was a keen family photographer. After he died, my aunt sat down with all the albums on one side of her chair and a large wastebasket in front of her. She’d take out a photograph, glance at it and say, “Sorry, Bruce,” then drop it in the wastebasket.

My aunt said it took too long. “Sorry, Bruce. Sorry, Bruce. Sorry, Bruce.” She would rather have been out and about; her phrasing. My Aunt Marg played tennis until her late 80s and died when she was almost 95.

“You can’t live in the past,” she told me.

Considering the contradictory advice, I’ve decided to leave the photographs for now, but not forever. 

3.

I think my Uncle Bruce had some sort of job in intelligence. We were never sure what he did, even though my mother and Aunt Marg were twins. My mother thought he’d worked in weapons development during the Second World in southern Alberta.

After the war, he had a job in Ottawa, apparently with the federal government. Eventually he and my aunt moved to Colorado Springs, where he held a senior position in NORAD. They retired to Florida, which my aunt said was boring, then moved back to Ottawa for their final years. 

The one thing my Aunt Marg told me about my uncle was that he’d watched the detonation of an atomic bomb during a test in the South Pacific. He was on a navy ship at the time. When she’d explained about the “Sorry, Bruce” purge, I wondered if he’d taken a photograph of the mushroom cloud and if my aunt had discarded it. 

I also wondered if she should have kept a few things, even if she’d been told not to. 

3.5

My mother-in-law kept everything and filed most of it neatly. We have a plastic box of letters written by family members in southern Ontario during the early years of the 20th century. Most of them lived on farms, but some had moved away for work. 

The letters were humdrum at the time but they’ve become folk history. I haven’t read all of them, but one time when I dipped into the box, I found a letter about a mother who gave a freshly-baked pie to the conductor on a train when it chugged into their local whistle stop. The conductor carried the pie a few hundred miles down the line, where her son met the train and picked it up. I believe the son was working in the States. No customs and immigration officers were involved in the exchange, the border being all but open at the time. 

Maybe those letters will eventually go to the provincial archives, or maybe they’ll stay in the family, presuming anyone wants them. Our son says he’s happy to hang onto a box of memorabilia that can be passed on. “One box, Mum.”

This leads to another purge-related question: What’s important to conserve for historical reasons and what can be shed guilt-free? 

A friend has one possible answer. A few years ago, she started a business sorting through the stuff left when peoples’ parents and grandparents die.

“Everyone thinks Great-Aunt Lizzy’s teacup is worth a fortune because it’s from 1850,” she told me. 

“They made millions of them. Only a very few are worth anything and nobody wants the rest. If you don’t like it, give it to a church bazaar.”

4.

A few years ago, I took an online seminar sponsored by the Writers Union of Canada that featured tips from professional archivists. They talked about what papers they want writers to send to the national, provincial and local archives, and it isn’t much. Of course, they’ll take all of Margaret Atwood’s shopping lists if she’s willing to give them, but they just want the highlights from the rest of us. 

I learned later they also want us to compile a finding aid for the papers we keep, A list that details each manuscript in our archives, all the notes our editors gave us and the important business letters. It gets pretty granular (another word I loathe). They want the name of the sender for each letter, the recipient, the date, and a precis of the contents so our archives are searchable online. 

The same is true of family archives, by the way. 

Preparing stuff for an archive is a lot of work, although it can also be freeing to consider your infinitesimal importance in the eyes of history. This makes it tempting to go through a box of papers with a shredder in front of me and say, “Sorry, Archive. I’m not going to use up my present for the sake of the theoretical future. Sorry, Archive. Sorry.”

Weighing the alternatives, I decided to get to my papers in the winter when I clean out the attic. 

5.

By the way, I told a friend the story about the pie on the train. She worked as a production designer in film, and said that years ago, when they were shooting movies in northern Ontario—tax incentives made this attractive—the only way to get props and costumes to the film location was to send them on a bus. Give them to the driver at the Toronto bus depot and he’d hand them over to someone waiting hundreds of miles away.

I think they still use the buses, she said, since no one else ships there. 

6.

Not long ago, one woman wrote an angry post in one of the online recycling groups I belong to. I couldn’t find it when I went back to look, so she might have taken it down. But I remember very clearly the points she made (along with the asterisks she used).

All this talk about purging, she wrote. It’s for middle-class privileged people who can congratulate themselves for being so f***ing charitable when they give their shit away. Then they can go out and buy a shiny new whatever any time they need it.

When you’re poor, you need to hang onto everything because you can’t afford to replace any of it. Not these days, not when rent takes three-quarters of your income, not with food costs going through the roof, not when even the thrift stores have gotten greedy bloody expensive. Don’t talk to me about all this purging shit during an affordability crisis. 

She says she lives in what we bougies would call a mess, with all her clothes, toiletries, pots, pans, dishes, blankets, pillows, comforters, onions, potatoes, cleaning supplies piled everywhere in the tiny basement apartment that’s all she can afford and she loves all of it. 

Looking around at all her stuff makes her feel secure. It makes her feel cushioned and protected. It makes her believe she’ll get through it. And we can all go to hell. 

7.

My mother was brought up during the Depression and she held onto things, too. Her family was okay financially, her father a small-town banker at first and then a government employee. She was proud of the way her mother always had a big pot of soup on the stove for hobos who came to the back gate. Word had got around they’d find food there. 

But my mother grew up seeing an endless line of hungry drifters, and it affected her. She learned how precarious the economy could be, and learned about the precarity of life itself while working as a nurse during the Second World War. 

Years later, when I was growing up, my father had a steady union job, and he usually picked up a second gig after work. But we never had a lot of money, and I would sometimes hear my parents fretting about whether they’d be able to make the mortgage payment. One year, they didn’t know whether we’d be able to afford a Christmas tree. If my mother ever bought something that wasn’t on sale, it was by mistake. 

She also bought a lot of it to stock up, inherited a great deal of family china, and never threw anything out. After my mother died, I had to make multiple trips to Vancouver to clear out her condo and then sell it. That’s one reason for the current purge. I refuse to leave our son with a mess. 

Yet because of the reverberations from my mother’s childhood and the parental worries during my own, I also know exactly what the angry woman was talking about, and it lingers in my mind as another kind of tip. 

The other day, I went into my clothes closet to look for something lighter to wear now that it’s finally starting to be spring. I’d gone through my clothes last fall, recycling a bunch the way I wrote about earlier. But I’d kept a couple of long sweater coats even though I hadn’t worn them for a while. I thought that if I wore them over the winter, I’d hang onto them. If not, they’d go out, too.

I hadn’t worn them, but I stood there staring at my remaining clothes while thinking about gas prices, food prices, economic uncertainty, recession, Depression, climate change, war, nuclear winter, the end of civilization as we know it and the fact you always need sweaters in Canada. Afterward, I shut the closet door. I’d already done one round of clothes recycling and the rest could wait.

8.

A final story. Our friends’ daughter moved into her grandmother’s house after getting married. The grandmother was in her 80s, and even though she wouldn’t admit it, she needed help. Meanwhile, the daughter and her husband needed a place to live. They got along brilliantly.

Yet our friends’ daughter and son-in-law began to worry. The grandmother routinely used an old stepladder to reach the dishes on the higher shelves of her kitchen cupboards. They pictured her falling and breaking her hip, and tried to persuade her to let them rearrange the cupboards. They could move the plates and supplies she used every day onto the lower shelves where they would be more accessible. 

The grandmother refused. Her cupboards were set up the way she was used to and she was too old to change. Our friend’s daughter persevered, and in the end I believe the grandmother allowed her life to be made easier, although I’m not certain about that. 

Here, now that our second floor is almost finished, I’m about to start recycling the discards in the basement. Afterward, we’re going to fix up the kitchen. I’m tall and it’s a while before I reach my 80s, so I have no problem getting things down from the top shelves of the cupboards, at least on my tiptoes. 

But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working on the house. The point is to pare down the number of things that need taking care of so we can spend more time doing what we want. I’ve told myself to take a tip from our friends’ daughter. I’m going to start noticing which dishes and kitchen supplies we use most often, which ones are back-up and what’s surplus to requirements. 

Afterward, I want to make a plan for the cupboards that takes into account my future decrepitude. We have to get new floors and do some painting, so I’ll clear out the cupboards beforehand, rearrange them accessibly, get rid of the extras, then forget about it. 

Someday this will be finished. 

But not yet.