I’m 64 and still doing this, with no plans to change!

I inherited a houseful of Colonial furniture (some faux, some real) from my parents nearly 15 years ago. Because it wasn’t practical to stuff it in my already furnished (Target, Ikea, and strip-mall futon store) condo 1,000 miles away, it all went in one day in an estate sale. I felt badly about it, but I had just spent seven months shuttling back and forth from Florida dealing with their stuff, and I was just done.

Since then, I’ve made three cross-country moves for my husband’s jobs. Some of the cheap stuff is still hanging in there just fine, some is a little worse for wear, and some got given away or tossed, but I realize that the next big event in the calendar could well be that someone will be cleaning out MY junk when I’m gone. I don’t want to leave them, whom I love, with a lot of guilt-inducing “heirlooms” and a giant decluttering task.

My sensibility is much more contemporary than my age would indicate. I, too, feel like a tourist in my mother’s world when I visit a furniture store, which I do as rarely as possible because it all seems like it’s for someone else’s life.

My furnishing criteria are: Is it tough, small, easy to clean, and easy to move? Because that’s what fits in my life, too. I simple can’t envision myself as the chatelaine of a house that would require a giant sideboard or armoire. And at 64, if not now, when? Looks like “never,” and I’m OK with that.