I admire people who are good at decluttering. I know people who, with surgical precision, whisk through their homes and eradicate anything that might be construed as clutter. Children and pets hide when they see those people coming.

I am not that person. I am, at best, a declutter wannabe. I walk through the house identifying things that should go to the great trash heap in the sky, but that will probably remain in place until a flood displaces them, or we move again.

I attribute it, in part, to being the child of a child of the depression. There is the inherited fear that as soon as you get rid of something, you may need it. 

My Mom was 8 at the start of the depression. When we cleared her house following her passing, she still had dolls from her childhood, dresses from her honeymoon, and my siblings’ and my baby clothes. I get it: such things hold fond memories. 

I credit/blame Mom for my tendency to save used-but-still-good boxes. When I say boxes, I’m talking enough to create a fortress. I justify it by noting that someday my grandchildren will have the joy of creating an edifice made of boxes that would be the envy of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Part of the challenge with the clutter is that not only have I inherited items down from my mother—cookie cutters, jewelry, a sewing machine and cabinet, and her dining set (none of which I consider clutter, but that do subtract from living space)—we have inherited up from our daughters. And because they are twins, we have a dual set of almost everything from clarinet and music stand, to bean bag chair, 6’ teddy  and books enough to stock every little library in upstate New York.

On a recent campaign to declutter, I texted the two of them a photo of some books from their childhood I was thinking to donate. In two texts that hit my phone at the exact same moment, I read mirror objections, “but Mom, I love Winnie the Pooh!”

I guess I should take consolation from the fact that I am not a hoarder. My home is not littered with mountains of clutter (boxes in garage excluded) through which you have to pick your way to sit down or clear a path to cook. It is just overdecorated with unnecessary objects.

Remember that old game show Let’s Make a Deal from the ‘60s through the 80s, where Monty Hall would go through the audience and pay women for peculiar things they had in their purse? I take strange pleasure in knowing that if they ever come out with a version where they go from house to house looking for oddities, I will win.