Clutter and Not-clutter

My parent's home feels like a hulking lesson in what not to do.  Primarily, DO NOT HOLD ON TO THINGS.

There are things and things and things everywhere.  Although they have every "make your life easier" device known to mankind, none of them are easy to use because you have to negotiate your way past THINGS to use the device thingys.

And the basement.  Oh, the basement.  The thing that threatens to become my inheritance. The thing that makes me hope I go before they do.

I think it's gotta be 1400 square feet, at least, of stuff.  And things.  Boxes and shelves and cupboards and storage containers full of the past.  You could crush an army with this stuff.

(I think, as I write that, that they have crushed their own spirits with the very weight of it all.)

Example.  Maya wants to make an elf hat, yesterday, for handing out the Christmas presents, today.  So I knew, from previous expeditions, of a dresser that contains fabric, some of it going back to the 60s.  Pretty sure there was some Christmas fabric, even, from when Mom made stockings.

So we went downstairs, and rifled through drawers, and found fabric, and marched upstairs with it, to clear with Mom what we might use to make the elf hat.  And she was very glad when we took a pass on some lime-greenish fabric because "she still might do something with it."

The drawers in that dresser are filled with cut-out patterns.  Butterick patterns pinned to fabric, ready to go under the needle.  It's never going to happen.  But there's my Mom, thinking it might.  Thinking she better hold on, because you never know - she just might need it.

Now maybe that's hopeful.  I guess it is.  But it's a kind of madness too, to hold on to this ages-old stuff and think that it might be useful one day.  Unlike, say, in the last 39 years.

And just so it doesn't look like it's only Mom's thang, in the second drawer down I found a collection of ties.  Now I have a project that I've been saving material for... oh God, the irony - for about ten years now, I guess - I have this notion that I want to make a quilt out of ties, because I once saw a picture of a quilt made out of ties and it was bee-yoo-tee-ful.

Oh my.  How this post is biting me in the ass right now.

So I ask my Dad, can I have these ties for my quilt project?  And his very first convulsive gesture is to say No.  To hold on.  And I ridicule him a little, as I am wont to do, hopefully in fun though some days I wonder if it is simply my variation on what my mother does, which is a metastasized expression of contempt, and oh I hope that's not what I'm doing...

He does know that it's silly to hold on to these ties...  I ask why he wants to, and he says they might come back in fashion, and that's the joke that hides the truth which is that they are his past, and he wore them when he was young, and to throw them away is to throw away his very youth, and who can do that?

But he lets me take them.  Except for three.  None of them distinguishable in any way, to me, but meaningful to him.  When I ask Why these three, he has nothing specific.  Just that he liked them.  And he'll put them back in a drawer and never look at them again.  But he has to hold on.

So his stuff will become my stuff which I will hold on to with this notion that I might make a quilt one day, just as my mother might use that 39-year-old material to make an outfit for Maya.

Jesus.   I have got to go home and start throwing out more shit.

But not the ties.