SPRING CLEANING
Marie Kondo doesn’t live here.
Memories fit nicely in cardboard boxes. A lot of boxes.
We are still in spring cleaning.
Throwing things out is more painful than it should be.
Marie Kondo doesn’t live here. That’s for sure. You know the lady. She made headlines with her house tidy philosophy, you must throw out any household item that does not bring you joy.
My God, woman. All my items bring me joy.
Still.
Of the approximately 11,000 books I have on bookshelves and in boxes in the basement and in the garage, I am determined to throw half of them out this year. Or at least a quarter of them.
Other stuff, too, is on the chopping block.
In my home office I have three boxes of cigars, two in beautiful polished wood boxes. One box is, I am sure, 10 years old.
I don’t smoke.
But one box was a gift. Two I bought in the Philippines. I can’t throw them out.
I have a display shelf of film cameras, lenses and old flashes I no longer use and cannot part with.
I have three or four printers I’m not throwing out, but if I did, it would free up one hell of a lot of space in my home office.
I have a lamp with the original fluorescent bulb I received as a Christmas present about 1972. I’m not kidding. I still use it. It still works. I have a photograph of me around somewhere receiving that gift on that long-ago Christmas Day. The original bulb in that lamp still shines, all these decades later.
Everything I touch in spring cleaning has a memory.
This book, Mien Kamph- you know the title- I bought in Ottawa, in a Sparks Street bookstore in 1973. I was one among a busload of high school students visiting from British Columbia. We were let out to enjoy a couple hours shopping. The book caught my eye.
A yellow cover caught my eye in a New Zealand book store, the original South-East Asia on a Shoestring, by Tony Wheeler, that started the Lonely Planet travel empire. That book became my travel Bible. It was in my backpack through my months of traversing South-East Asia.
I have so many books written by and about Joseph Campbell they have their own bookshelf.
Much Canadian history. Much Can Lit. Most of it in boxes. The only Margaret Atwood book I’ve ever enjoyed, Survival. I’ve read it a dozen times.
Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda. I’ve read that book two dozen times. That book is around here somewhere.
I have a Bible given to me by my great-grandmother. She signed it. She wrote in the date, March 8, 1966. It is a treasure. It sits on my desk. That’s not going anywhere.
Dictionaries. Lord, do I have dictionaries. I must have ten of the things.
One massive dictionary given to me in the 1960s by an English teacher. I haven’t used it in decades. I don’t see it in the office, it must be in a box somewhere.
Wherever it is, I cannot throw it out. I remember the teacher. I remember the moment I was presented that gift at the end of a school year. It meant much to me. Still does.
That’s the tough thing about spring cleaning. Everything I touch has a living memory.
It’s so damned hard to throw out memories.
A post script…
By the way, I just learned Marie Kondo threw in the towel after her second child. She’s given up on perfection. It’s hard to hold back a snicker learning that. :)
