A couple of years ago, people started talking about"death cleaning," a morbid moniker for purging extraneous things in our houses so our kids won't have to decide what to do with it all when we die.
I'm going to call it first-page-of-next-chapter cleaning. As I haul things from the house to the casita and organize it in baskets and carts, I can honestly say that it's a satisfying and relaxing process. When I move one thing, everything else changes. Space opens up. Clutter vanishes, piece by piece, as I deliver bags of formerly useful things to Boysville Thrift Shop.
Tonight, Will and Bonnie came over and Elena went straight to the work table and started drawing. She found the drawers for different kind of markers and immediately began playing with them. "I think we should turn the tree house into a studio for me," she told her dad. "But of course, we're going to need walls and electricity and tables."
I saw an Ugh-Oh look cross Will's face.
The kind of cleaning I'm doing, moving and re-organizing correlates with the natural process of aging, a time when we are less interested in acquiring and more interested in simplifying. We don't want to be slaves to stuff that no longer brings pleasure. May Sarton in her journal At Sixty said, "I am no longer acquisitive...."
And yet, I find that I am acquisitive--just of different things: pleasure, learning, art supplies, moments I want to capture with a camera, and freedom.
According to an internet search I just did: The death cleaning method bears similarities to that of the tidying-up guru Marie Kondo: Keep what you love and get rid of what you don't. But while Kondo tells people to trash, recycle or donate what they discard, Magnusson recommends giving things you no longer want to family and friends "whenever they come over for dinner...."
Or, I might add, putting them on the curb for neighbors and passers by to discover.
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