Spring Cleaning? Don’t Take My Advice

It’s fifty degrees and the forsythia is budding. That means one thing: I will try, and probably fail, to do a serious spring cleanout.

Here’s why I want to try: I’m embarrassed by the thought of my kids cleaning out our house after I’m gone. It’s too easy to imagine them saying things like, “Who still uses paper clips?” or “Why are there DVDs mixed in with the cookbooks?”

They’ll moan over the collections of hand-embroidered aprons and Spanish fans. They’ll puzzle over hundreds of photographs of relatives whose names nobody remembers, piled together in a wooden box gathering dust in the living room.

I’ve got a spring cleaning “to do” list that includes sensible steps like buying boxes, so I can pack up extra mugs, clothing, and silverware for Goodwill; calling local consignment shops to see if they want that extra furniture; and ordering a dumpster.

Yes. A dumpster. That’s because we don’t just have a house that needs purging, but a whole barn. A stately, 18th-century barn.

A barn that now contains, among other things: my father’s ancient camera equipment; several bikes; my mother’s wedding china; my husband’s science fiction books; a toboggan we’re all afraid to ride; Halloween costumes that don’t fit anyone; a fender from one son’s old car; several pairs of skis nobody uses; and countless piles of lumber and boxes of screws, nuts, drill bits, and plastic pieces that my husband is certain will come in handy one day. (Just recently he crowed about having found a screw that fit perfectly when he was fixing a broken desk chair.)

In other words, whenever we can’t find something, we say, “It must be in the barn!” Then we hang our heads in despair because that barn is our Bermuda Triangle.

Other people are better at spring cleaning than I am. They must have the sort of ruthlessness I lack. An ability to say, “Nope, I don’t care if I give away my son’s old guitars.”

My problem is that I cherish our family memories, and many of these objects represent different eras in our family. Pictured here, for instance, is a table, some pottery, and two paintings. The table is an old gardening table I found in the shed of our first house—the house where my husband and I were married. I sanded, painted, and varnished it so I could use it as a writing desk for many years.

The pottery? That was on my mother-in-law’s shelves in her living room until she died. I miss her every day and it makes me feel better to see it.

And that painting of the horse? Primitive, I know. But it was done by my great-grandmother when she was sixteen years old—before she sailed from England to America.

Every object we possess tells a story. (Okay, maybe not the boxes of screws or stacks of lumber.) Those art projects my children created remind me of how it was to have a house full of their ideas and energy. The things cluttering my desk—a paperweight from my first husband, a mug from my son’s high school, and a handmade box from a good friend—are reminders of my path to get to where I am now.

The reason why so many of us have trouble following the reasonable Marie Kondo philosophy of discarding and tidying all at once is that our objects contain multitudes: ourselves as children, parents, friends, and partners. With so much information coming at us every minute via phones and computers, our memories of past selves get pushed into dusty mental corners and become trickier to access. Our objects act as magic portals to the past.

Ideally, our house and barn will be tidy one day. I’ll keep whittling away at the clutter. But I suspect many of these objects will be with me to the end, including that box of old photos. Even nameless, they are still family.