Sifting a Life

Trunk room, after decluttering

All houses hold stories. Old houses, especially, are layered with history. Sitting in the trunk room of my 102-year-old Saint Paul home, I’ve been spending time, sifting through the stuff of my life.

Trunk rooms are old-fashioned versions of modern walk-in closets. A century ago, trunk rooms were big enough to store massive Victorian trunks and probably all of a family’s extra clothes and belongings.
Twenty-one years ago, when we moved here just before I gave birth to our second son, this trunk room by our boys’ bedroom served as the changing room. Outfitted with the changing table, diaper pail, and a dresser full of baby and toddler clothes, the changing room saw plenty of use, along with a good measure of tears and tantrums.

Later on, as our sons grew, the changing room changed as well. It morphed into our older son’s bedroom, a cozy space with a single bed, book shelves, chair and lights. When our son outgrew the narrow space, I moved my desk in and tried to make this windowless closet my office, a room of my own for writing. Turns out, I need a view.  Out went the desk. The trunk room became the family storage closet, lined with five file cabinets, three bookshelves, 24 feet of wall shelves, and a lifetime of memories. Each time I open the door, scenes from long ago shout, “This is Your Life!”

I step into the past, braced to re-visit more than five decades of my life, along with photo albums, kid art, decades of letters and assorted posters and awards. This isn’t an aimless stroll down memory lane. I’m eager to downsize, to pare what I don’t need, so in a few years, my husband and I can move to a more manageable condo, perfect for two people who prefer travel to house projects.  

Photo boxes on top shelf will stay closed, for now.

I’ve already winnowed two file cabinets, five bookshelves (not all in the closet), and four photo boxes of notebooks and work photos. The closet is still crammed. The top shelf sags with eighteen boxes of photos, the record of our two sons’ childhoods. Without looking, I can see the photos that make up our family’s timeline —me, bleary-eyed after giving birth; Leo, smiling, holding first one baby then another; toddlers swerving and honking in their orange and blue plastic cars in the backyard; years of a little boy’s fascination with firetrucks, followed by the Pokémon phase, then the Star Wars era, the boys dressed as Obi Wan and Luke Skywalker. Opening those boxes would unleash childhood again, light sabers whirring, toy fire trucks blaring, bedtime Civil War melodies playing. The little boys in those photos are grown into men, one graduated from college. I’m not ready to set the time machine to their childhoods again. Maybe I dread how quiet and pale our empty nest will seem compared to those rambunctious growing up years. I glare at the boxes, knowing I’ll need to decide which photos to pitch and which merit scanning. Always I think, “That’s a project for another day.”

It’s easier to slide open file drawers and drift through years of my work life. Writers like me have long paper trails. I recycle newspapers I edited in high school and college; decades-old magazine articles and essays. My recycling bins overflow. I search the house for extra tubs and trash bins to cram with more salvageable bits of my career. Next candidate for sorting: file drawers full of research from my two trail guide books for adults and sixteen nonfiction biographies and histories for young people.

Some things are too hard to purge. I keep the bittersweet research for a book my publisher paid for but didn’t publish. Still, it’s encouraging to see how easy it is to part with piles of my past work. Really, I should have pitched most files years ago. The books are published; I don’t need the research notes. I grab two boxes, wedged with dozens of little spiral-bound notebooks, full of scribbled notes I’d written while researching Twin Cities and Minnesota walking and running trails. Cozying up to my recycling bin, I shuck pages from each notebook, creating tiny sprays of confetti in the bin and surrounding carpet. As I pick off confetti scraps from my jeans, I smile and remind myself that I have reason to celebrate—I’m freeing fragments from the past, instead of desperately clinging to old stuff.  Then I look down at the detritus—a shiny tangle of forty-some coiled notebook spirals. Hmm. For now, I set the tangled mess out of sight, hoping I’ll conjure some creative use for all that shiny wire. Days later, I toss the tangled mess in the trash.

What to do with boxes full of photographs of Minnesota parks and trails? I took hundreds of pictures while researching my two guidebooks. I start tossing photos in recycling, then stop. Surely, somebody could use nature pictures for some kind of craft project, right?  Let’s see, who would want all these pictures? Aha! Artscraps!  I call the fabulous Saint Paul thrift shop, a tiny place packed with all kinds of arts, crafts, and odds and ends, and yes, they’ll accept my old photos, along with several cardboard mailing tubes also begging for a new home. When I drop off my stuff, I notice sea shells. “Hey,” I ask, “Can I bring you more shells?” The staffer smiles and shakes her head, “Now, we have more than enough. Thanks anyway.” I guess my shells will end up in the garden, with all the rocks I’ve collected over the years.

Back in the trunk room, I come across a cache of old business cards, a passport and IDs dating back to a 1980s. The laminated and hard plastic cards offer a fast flipbook of my adult life. The 1985 Moorhead State University student ID shows me as young, preppy, and serious in a blue Oxford and pink sweater. I’d signed up for MSU econ classes to keep busy during the worst year of my life, working nights as a newspaper copy editor in Fargo, North Dakota. My old WCCO-TV newsroom IDs display variations of my young-serious-woman look, with or without lipstick. Back then, I thought if I sucked my cheeks in and didn’t smile, I’d look thinner. Now, I shake my head and wonder why I didn’t just smile. At least I look cheerful in a few expired driver’s licenses, with long earrings and even longer reddish brown hair. I tuck the vintage IDs in a box of old business cards, mementos of jobs and titles long gone, but all worth remembering.      

I spy two Rolodexes and a stack of videotapes, remnants from ten years as a TV producer. Flipping through the Rolodexes spins me back to the ‘80s, when my news contacts included experts about Watergate videos, Central America, and Star Wars (think Ronald Reagan, not George Lucas). I read and toss names and numbers for atheists, abortion, and coffee (journalists love to report new research about coffee), Gypsies; cults, and toys, Pravda, porn, and plastic surgeons. Once the empty Rolodexes are in my Goodwill pile, it’s video time.

I had saved a dozen tapes of my TV news stories and features, figuring I’d want to review them or show them to my kids someday. Someday never happened. Time to let them go. So what to do with old beta and videotapes?  Going online, I get fast answers from my CCO friends. Based in Golden Valley, the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting/ accepts old news tapes, as does TC Media Now. I haul the tapes downstairs, where they sit for a few weeks, reproaching me every time I pass. Finally, I reach out to TC Media Now and within hours, someone swings by my house to take the tapes. I’m delighted the videos are gone, and that some of my favorite stories might be posted online and reach new viewers.

I’m learning how much stamina it takes to sort through a life. It takes hours to sift through papers, pictures, and files; it takes a fresh mind to find the best place for each item, then more energy to shed the unwanted scraps. In my crammed “To-read” file, I skim a New York Times article about downsizing, which quotes Kimberly McMahon, whose Let’s Move business helps boomers declutter. McMahon says, “Downsizing is the hardest because it is emotionally difficult for people to release their history. It’s the worst anxiety associated with any move.” She and other downsizing experts (who knew?)  advise people not to wait—to instead sort drawers and closets every six months, instead of waiting decades. Of course, since so many of us accumulate rather than periodically prune, now there’s an industry of decluttering experts, whose fees range from $60 to over $200 an hour.

I don’t want to hire a decluttering expert; I’d rather re-examine the past myself. Each time I find a new home for old cast-offs, each bin of recycled files I schlep to the curb, each file drawer I empty makes me happy. I’m simplifying my life, sloughing off what I did before, so history won’t weigh me down as I move forward. As I sift and sort, I daydream about future jobs. Maybe I should become a decluttering expert. I’m organized, resourceful, and the right demographic to help fellow boomers.

I remember what a favorite yoga teacher said about spring cleaning our minds and bodies. Ann’s comments made me think about how I’m spring cleaning my life. Really, it’s more like fall cleaning. Springtime is our birth and childhood; we’re green and new; summer is the hot and busy season of young adulthood, when we’re bursting with sexuality, ambition and goals, sprouting career and family. Now, at age 55, I’ve reached the beginning of my autumn. Fall has always been my favorite season —cool, temperate weather for running and sleeping, beautiful leaves all around. As I sit on the floor in my windowless closet, I’m summoning a life, reflecting on the jobs and people who have shaped me. Sifting old notebooks, photos, papers and tapes that I once needed, I’m ready to let them go, recycling parts of my life.

As I pare the storage, I’m parsing my life, weighing what I have and haven’t done. I left that full-time TV job when my sons were young and later shifted to freelance writing. The money is wretched; the benefits wonderful. I had the luxury to be with my kids and work when I could. I had time to build sofa forts, pitch a big tent in dining room for cozy winter reading parties, escape to the gym for blessed solo workouts before my husband left for work, run marathons, read, and even write books.

Seeing my books and old stories reminds me that I have been a capable writer. That steadies my sagging confidence. In recent years, I’ve worried that I have lost the thread, run out of ideas and focus to write. My books and articles seemed weightless; as ephemeral as dust. Surrounded by my past, sitting in the trunk room, a Pink Floyd song floats through my head, “Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time. Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines…” 
I snap out of my reverie, tell myself I’ve been a writer and can, perhaps, be one again. I want to write another book, to get paid for my words. To write something that matters. For now, though, it’s time to focus on losing pounds of the past.  Filtering a lifetime of paper and personal effects is way of taking control, editing my own story. I want to decide what happens to the miscellany I’ve taken the time to save and file. I don’t want my kids or anyone else to clean up after me. In recent years, I’ve helped clean out apartments and a house after the deaths of a friend or their parent. Since 2010, I’ve helped my mother move apartments four times. Each move has required leaving behind more memories and minutiae. When mom was still living in her old apartment, she made an effort almost every day for a year to find something to give away or discard. She sent me tablecloths, tchotchkes, and family mementoes, some of which I’m liberating now.

Relinquishing what we do not need is a process, a stage of life as natural as acquiring. We celebrate the receiving-- birthday presents, graduation gifts, wedding and baby registries, the seasons of getting and growing. Maybe we need to do more celebrating about this season of life, the time of reflecting and the beginning of letting go.

 Reader, I am becoming lighter.