In early December, I visited my mom at her house, a small cottage in Hyannis, where we had plans to set up her Christmas decorations. But when I arrived, she was hesitant to follow through with them: “I have to clear out stuff first,” she said when I offered to bring up her crèche from the basement.
I knew that wouldn’t happen anytime soon, so I insisted on bringing up the box of decorations. Alas, there was no space for baby Jesus — never mind an inn — on the top of her bookcase. In fact, it was difficult even to approach the bookshelf behind piles of magazines, stacks of books, and her CD player.
For those of you resolved to clear out clutter in this new year, I have good tidings. In a few hours, my mother and I had some success at the task. It was truly a Christmas miracle.
First, it’s hard to do this alone. Sometimes you need an objective eye to help expose the illogical attachments we have to some of our stuff. We started easy. Sitting by the doorway was a bag full of paper bags that my mom had been collecting for my dad to burn in his wood stove (they live apart) and a jumble of plastic bottles waiting to be recycled. I whisked them outside to take with me when I left. We now had a corner to set up her CD player, clock radio, and a bin of CDs. I didn’t begin going through those — some things can be left for another day. My objective now was how to take more things with me.
Redistribution
We’ve all been conditioned not to throw things out. My mother is a baby boomer, brought up by the frugal generation that had survived the Great Depression and World War II. Throwing things out was wasteful. Now our eco-consciousness recasts it as immoral, even if we aren’t deterred from accumulating stuff in the first place. Recycling will solve everything, right?
We set up a few bags and boxes for redistributing things. One bag was for overdue books and magazines from the library, another for things she could donate to her church’s book exchange; there was a box for books and magazines to go to the swap shop and, finally, a bag for trash.
My mom sat on the couch, and I kept things moving, relentlessly piling books at her feet. “Oh, this one is so good,” she would say, clutching it tightly. I assured her someone else would appreciate it as I filled the box for the swap shop. (For those of you in the market for sentimental Christian fiction, there’s now a lot of it at the Wellfleet swap shop).
I let her keep some things, setting aside works of literary value, like a collection of fiction by Wendell Berry. Of course, there was no touching her Bibles. I once counted five Bibles in her car, and there were about that same number in close proximity to the couch.
Mom had numerous diet books she doesn’t use and two books on bread, including Bread Therapy: The Mindful Art of Baking Bread. As far as I can remember, my mom has never baked bread, but I wasn’t about to deny her the possibility that it might happen one of these days.
I’m also guilty of aspirational book hoarding. In college I dropped out of a class on Spenser and Milton. I couldn’t force myself through Spenser’s Faerie Queene and never made it to Milton, but I have held onto a hardback edition of Paradise Lost for 20 years. I will get to it, I keep telling myself. I’ve also inherited some of my mother’s taste for religious literature: two oversize Biblical commentaries that never get opened but take up significant real estate on my bookshelf. My library habits are similarly ambitious; at least half of the books I check out get returned unread.
As we were making progress, I texted updates to my two sisters. “Helping Mom ‘go through things,’ ” I wrote, using one of her favorite phrases. We’ve all heard it when we’ve tried helping her declutter: “I have to go through things,” she’ll say evasively. I included a picture of her surrounded by a pile of books, papers, and magazines as proof that the day of going through things had arrived. They could hardly believe it. “I bet nothing will be thrown away, lol,” wrote my sister Dee.
My sisters are themselves guilty of abetting some of this accumulation. Dee bought my mom a subscription to Cooking Light. The magazines were everywhere, along with recipes, some handwritten, others torn from various magazines. I’ve never known my mother to cook from recipes, aside from when she’s baking, so I encouraged parting with the food magazines. I was proud of her as the recycling bins began to fill up.
I noticed a few baskets in the bathroom overflowing with magazines: Voice of the Martyrs, Magnolia, Edible Cape Cod, some of my articles from the Provincetown Independent (thanks, Mom!), and of course, more Cooking Light.
At the bottom of one pile I found a well-intentioned but unused gift to Mom from my sister Maria: the book Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up by the decluttering guru, Marie Kondo. We held onto it, just in case.
Progress and Rewards
We ended up filling two boxes with books to donate and a few bags of magazines to donate or recycle. There was now space to add books to her bookshelf and room on top — not only for baby Jesus but also for Mary and Joseph, the wise men, all the animals, and even a few angels. We kept some magazines in a plastic container but managed to keep the stack to just under one foot tall.
Issues of Magnolia, a home magazine favoring minimalist style, proved most difficult to give up. If you can’t live in an airy, impeccably curated space, at least you can fantasize about it.
Satisfied that we’d made real headway, we rewarded ourselves with some Chinese takeout. “This is delicious,” my mother said as we shared a dish of lo mein, pork fried rice, and egg rolls. I agreed. We didn’t need Cooking Light after all.
