Nobody Wants My Stuff
We are getting a home built in San Tan Valley, Arizona. We will begin spending our winters there next year. In the meantime, we own a very large home in mid-Missouri. Large homes are large containers. We have a lot of decisions to make about this home. The first one, is should we keep this home or downsize our Missouri home. Our home in Arizona is considerably smaller than our home in Missouri. It also will not have a basement, which in my opinion, is only good for storing junk we don’t want to deal with. I like the idea of downsizing the Missouri home. Even if we don’t sell our home immediately, we sure can get rid of “stuff” that no one is going to want after we have left this earth.
I have been reading articles online about the fact that, “nobody wants your stuff.” The articles I have read said that furniture is not a desired thing any longer. Old furniture may not be antiques like they used to be. Furniture today is mass produced. It has no more value than the time it was purchased. Most young people today have filled their homes with furniture from IKEA and Target. They don’t want that “old” stuff. Homes have grown in size since World War II, and people have filled them quite well. They don’t have room to take anyone else’s furniture. I really do not understand people renting storage units to put the extra “stuff” in. If you have done this, I am not judging. I just don’t understand it. I suppose it is because “stuff” overwhelms me. If I am surrounded by overloaded closets, drawers, etc., I start to feel claustrophobic. I cannot maneuver through the stuff, and at some point, I have to stop and clean these areas out.
My husband and I decided that it is time to start cleaning out closets and rooms. I read the first place to start is with paper. I had already done that, and found old tax returns of mine. I checked with my accountant how long I had to hold onto personal tax returns and learned I didn’t need any of these paper returns. My latest few years have been done online, and I have the PDF documents in my computer, and I also have a backup of my 
computer. When my mom was young, she kept scrap books. I have her old scrapbooks. The paper is yellow with age, and the glue has come undone on a lot of her entries. I have scanned some of the things, but I am thinking of scanning the complete scrapbooks. I love the old articles she has saved about things she found interesting, or about people she knew. I know some of these families today, and scanning these newspaper articles and sharing them with these families is a nice way for them to see some history they may not have known. It is like the email that I have printed and saved since 2000. I found it in my files the other day—I wrote my blog last week about that email. I was glad I found it, and it has real meaning to me, but probably to very few other folks. I think I will scan the document into my computer, and throw away the printed copy.
Of course, another issue is photographs. I have boxes of them. Most of them have been scanned into my computer, and since I have a Mac, they are also labeled per person. If I want to see all the photos I have of a particular person, I go to my Photos program, and find their name, and all photos I have of them pop right up. So, now, what do I do with the original photos? That still has me perplexed. I breaks my heart to throw them away, but my children can have them all digitally from my computer. One article I read said to be of service to your parent by taking something they give you because maybe it’s too hard for them to throw away. They might have an inkling you are going to throw it away, but they are not doing it—something that just might be too hard to do. Thus, all my photos.
Learning to let go is a gift. Sometimes we hold onto things just because it has some “meaning” that if we really think about it, is not in the object itself. When we watch those television shows about hoarders, you see them holding onto a piece of junk because it was their mom’s or has some sentimental meaning, that is not actually in the object itself. They cannot let it go. I’m not that bad, but I know I struggle with some things that have family memories, and wonder how to let it go without feeling bad about it. I still have all the sympathy cards and notes from my parents’ funerals. Do I save them? Why am I saving them? When my mom died, I received only a few cards. I was just recovering from my “dark years,” had been going to a 12-step program for codependency, and had lost connection with many people. I remember thinking that if I died right then, not many people would come to my funeral, or even miss me in any way. When my dad passed away fifteen years later, I received an abundance of sympathy cards, and had many friends and colleagues come to the viewing and funeral. I felt connected to the world again, and it was comforting. I think that is why I hold onto those cards. It shows a reality of my life that I need to remember. I suppose it is okay to pack them in a box to look at every once in a while, and know one day either I or my kids will discard them.
Books are also a huge issue. When I married Dennis, we downsized books. We donated 1,500 paperback books to the St. Louis Book Fair. We have 12 floor to ceiling shelves of books with 99.9% being hard bound books. What do we do with them? Do people buy used books? Do we try to sell what we “think” are the rare ones and donate the rest? What to do? Although I love the feel of holding a book in my hand, picking it up, being able to highlight something in it, and reread it again, books are becoming harder for me to read. Who would think that I would admit that I am not seeing as well as I used to? So, for me, downloading an electronic book on my phone is so perfect. I can adjust the size of the print, I can lighten or darken the background to read it better. The sad, sad thing about electronics books is that I can’t hand a favorite book to a friend to share in the reading. I miss that. I love when someone hands me a book. In my downsizing world, though, electronic books are the best.
I am not one of those people who owns everyday china and good china, but I have to admit, I am one of those who owns Christmas china. Christmas is my favorite holiday, and about 15 years ago I found this dinnerware on sale, and thought it was really pretty, cute, whatever, but I decided I wanted to celebrate the holidays with this china. When my kids came over for Thanksgiving, after the dishes were done, I had them help me move the china. My kitchen was adequate in size, but not huge. I stored the Christmas dishes in the cabinet above the refrigerator. So, Thanksgiving evening, one of my boys would get on the step stool and pull out the dishes and hand them to me. I would hand him my everyday dishes to store until New Years. I did that every year for a long time. When I married Dennis, and moved to our home in mid-Missouri, I inherited a kitchen beyond my dreams when it came to cabinet space. The kitchen is 24’ x 12’ with a 8’ island in the center. I don’t know the exact number of cabinets, but I do know when we were updating the kitchen and I wanted to change the cabinet and drawer pulls, the number I counted was 56! Yeah, that’s a lot of space to store “stuff.” I also have a walk in pantry between the kitchen and the dining room, and that is where I store my Christmas dishes, glasses, mugs, and serving pieces. Now I don’t have to swap out the dishes every season. I will be sad when I decide to say good-bye to the Christmas dishes. That will happen one day, not sure if it is sooner or later.
I have two things of mine that I am not sure what to do—they both have meaning to me, but maybe not to anyone else. The first one is my Howdy Doody doll. He is actually not the original, but I found him years ago on eBay, and I had to have him. When I was about 2 1/2 years old, my parents were going to a wedding in Detroit, Michigan. They delivered us three sisters to my grandparents to spend the weekend, and apparently, I was distraught at them leaving me. They decided to take me with them. Of course, I don’t remember any of this. This is the story my mom told me. While in Detroit, my mom bought this Howdy Doody doll for me, and my photo was taken there. I have the photo and the doll on display. I remember playing with that doll for years. I loved watching the “Howdy Doody Show.” It 
just makes me feel good when I see this photo and the doll. The other thing is a photo of myself that is framed and hanging in one of our guest rooms. I am probably about 9 months to a year old. My mom saved the dress I wore in the photo. It was always stuck away somewhere in a box. Years ago I got this brilliant idea to frame the dress with the photo, because who has the exact clothes they wore when their baby photo was taken? I am not sure anyone will want that in the future. The Howdy Doodie might be valuable because this particular doll is rare, but do they want these photos and this dress? Who knows? Those two things will stay with me until my days are done. Then they (my four sons) can do whatever they want with all my “stuff.”
When I first moved to this home, I was coming to a home that my husband and his wife (who passed away) had lived in. The cabinets were filled to the brim, along with the closets, and every room. I told him there was no room for me, even though this house was huge. This sweet man cleared room for me, mostly by giving much of the stuff to his wife’s family. They were appreciative to have many memories of their sister. There are duplicates of some kitchen stuff, but on the whole, I brought my things. I know my kitchen things, and I like using them. We do own five colanders, and I use maybe three of them, depending on what it is for, but my favorite is still my mom’s old Tupperware colander from the 60’s.
This winter we will be clearing out closets. We decided to do a closet at a time, and we will do it together. My husband is very sentimental, so this will be a difficult project for him. I will give him room to grieve, to hold onto whatever he needs to hold onto. He will give me room to do the same. In the end, though, we both know it is just stuff. If our house burned down tomorrow, and he and I survived with only the clothes on our backs, we would be okay. We know we are blessed.
Letting go voluntarily, is another issue. It takes time and patience. Wish us luck—we a digging in!
who were asleep. We found out that if they were sleeping and if we didn’t fully wake them up, they would talk to us in their sleep. We would ask them questions, and because they were asleep, they would answer, but usually with something nonsensical which made us laugh, although we had to laugh quietly so we wouldn’t wake anyone up, especially our dorm leaders who would know we were up and around after “lights out.” We also learned that some people just don’t like to be bothered while they are sleeping, one in particular who swung her arm at us in her sleep. Fortunately, we ducked to keep from being hit, and it put us into a fit of giggling, which we had to do very quietly.
Instead of letters, we were now emailing each other. Steph was married to Roger, and they now had two teenage children. Time sure does fly! I don’t know what kind of computer she had, but every so often, I wouldn’t hear from her in a while. Whenever that happened I got concerned because she was not in good health. I would send her an email or two, hoping she was okay. Sshe wrote back and apologized because she was having computer problems, and one time she mailed a note because her computer crashed. Back in the late 90’s PC’s crashed a lot! I was always relieved to hear from her again.
It started, “Andrea, I regret to reply with sad news about Steph. Steph was called home by her heavenly father on June 2nd. It was a great a shock to all of us, how sudden and the agonizing series of events.” This was an email from Steph’s email account but written by her husband, Roger, to me. He said that Steph was so happy with the anticipation of her surgery (the upcoming transplant). In late May, she called Roger and he rushed home to find her lying on the floor short of breath. He called 911 and within minutes they were rushing her to the hospital. They stabilized her at the local hospital, and then transferred her to the Cleveland Clinic, where her specialists were waiting for her. That next day, her husband went home to get his daughter ready for prom. Steph was sitting up in bed and doing well, and was going to be transferred from ICU to a regular room. When he returned to the hospital a few hours later, the doctors were waiting form him to inform him that she took a “nose-dive” and needed to go into emergency surgery. She had a 4-hour surgery in the early evening to stop the internal hemorrhaging. At 9:00 am the next morning, the doctor took her back into surgery for over 3 hours to stop additional hemorrhaging.
Today as we were trying to figure out what to do on vacation day #18, I discovered that the Tupperware Headquarters was still in Orlando. It brought back a lot of memories for me, so we decided to drop in and see what they had to show.
The favorite party that I did was to make a pie crust in a Tupperware mixing bowl, in the middle of someone’s living room without making a mess. I had the flour and salt pre-measured in the mixing bowl. I had the shortening in a separate (Tupperware, of course) container. I would take a knife and proceed to cut small portions of shortening and drop into the flour mixture until I had all the shortening added to the bowl. I closed the bowl by attaching the “seal.” That’s right, NEVER call a lid a lid. In Tupperware, it was ALWAYS a seal. Why? Because it was airtight, and if round, 
also watertight. Once the seal was on and burped, I held the bowl sideways and starting shaking up and down. It was hard to chat while doing this, and it also doesn’t get my point across, so I handed the bowl to the closest person and told her to start shaking, and when she was tired of it, pass it to the next person until it went around the room. As they were doing that, I talked about the great measuring cups and measuring spoons that I used in measuring the ingredients. Tupperware was the first to have a six cup measuring set, and the same for the measuring spoons. Now the bowl, had made it around the room. I set the bowl on the table and carefully opened the seal and showed the group that the shortening and flour has combined into little pieces just like you had used a pastry blender. They seemed 
pretty amazed. Then I used the only ingredient that I asked the hostess to provide—cold water! I added the measured cold water to the bowl, sealed it once again, and passed it around the room and told them to start shaking again. During this time I was also telling about the bowls, seals, and who knows what else until everyone all of a sudden realized they were hearing a thumping sound from the bowl they were passing around. I retrieved the bowl, opened the seal, and showed everyone that the pie dough was in a nice round ball ready for rolling into a pie crust. To top this off, I had baked a pie at home that day, and brought it to the party so they saw the finished product. My family didn’t get a pie that day, but they got one the next day with the dough I made at the party, or sometimes, I gave the hostess the dough that she could roll out to a pie the next day. To say the least, my little Tupperware cash register started ringing and ringing. I sold a ton of mixing bowls, measuring spoons, and measuring cups.
I think about this and how fun it was to do. I also remember terrible parties where I just wanted to pack my case and go home. I once did a party with about ten middle age women who were what I would call upper-middle class. They watched the demonstration, and then this lady blares out, “I have gone 20 years without Tupperware, I think I can go another 20 years.” At that point, this mid-20’s Tupperware lady saw all the other ladies nod their heads and put down their order forms. To counter that, I also did a party for a hostess who asked to have a party because she had a special dinner at her home where a professional chef came to prepare the meal, and he asked her for her Tupperware to store some of these ingredients, and she had none. She and her friends, who had no problem buying anything they wanted, proceeded to purchase a great quantity of Tupperware storage items.
but not phased. She needed me for her recognition of promoting 20 new managers at the annual sales Jubilee in Orlando. She said I didn’t have work full time, if I would still accept the position. Why, of course. Let’s see, they handed me a blue Ford station wagon, which I had to only pay $10 per month that covered all insurance for me and my husband’s personal use. It was a great vehicle for delivery all the Tupperware orders to the hostess (not done this way any longer). I think I can do that! I also got a small override on my team member’s sales. I did this until I was about 8 months pregnant, and then I resigned completely from my job. I wanted to be with my three babies. It was a good ride. I made nice money—more than I would make working part time at a retailer, I set my hours, and I filled my kitchen with great products at a huge discount.
Shape-O Ball – Although not a storage or cooking item This ball is a classic toy that has been around since the mid 60’s. Other toy companies have made shape toys, but this is the gold standard.
Modular Mates – Best canister storage available. They come in various sizes. I use these for my flour, sugar, brown sugar, and powdered sugar. They are square and rectangular and take up less room in your cabinets.
Bell Tumblers – Everyone with little kids needs these. They are the right size for little hands. They have a non-slip outer surface, and they are happy colors!
Tupper Minis – They were called 2 oz. midgets back in the day—I guess that’s not PC anymore—best tiny storage for little snacks like raisins, M&M’s for little folks—meaning children.
Citrus Peeler – Actually Crate and Barrel has a similar one.
Egg separator – best one ever, and the little groove on the handle was to hook onto a Tupperware container.
Rocker Scoop – So glad I still have them in my flour and sugar canisters—doesn’t have a handle and can be squeezed to pour into something narrow.
There are only a few things that intimidate me. One is being in a situation that is completely new to me. The other is what anyone who has a weight issue has—body issues. So, when I got a phone call a month ago telling me that I won an honorable mention in a contest and they wanted me to come for a professional photo shoot, it raised my anxiety level through the roof.
All my life I have struggled with my weight. I look at photos of my youth, and I wasn’t really that big, but what is in our head and what we hear other people say, can burn itself in our brains. My brain said I was overweight and unattractive, and no matter what I did, that wouldn’t change. Food was a part of our culture. Our family ate to celebrate, we ate when we were feeling blue, we ate to entertain guests, and we ate just because we could!
So, in 1973 I joined Weight Watchers. Weight Watchers was nothing like it is today. There were restricted foods, and we were supposed to eat liver once a week and fish twice a week. Regardless, I lost 28 lbs. but, of course, like many, I did not stick with Weight Watchers to make lifetime membership. Three babies later, my weight started inching up with each pregnancy. I became friends again with Weight Watchers, The Diet Center, Calorie Counting, Jenny Craig, Atkins, you name it. I was always somewhat successful, but never down to where I wanted to be before I got bored, hungry, or whatever else the excuse was. Once again, my weight would inch up. 
nauseated. If I ate too much, I would feel sick. My goal to lose 60 pounds in that six months became a reality. I was amazed when that happened. Exercise also became part of this routine. My husband and I are retired, and we live in the country. If we walk our whole neighborhood, it is a 3 mile walk from walking out our door to returning. I wasn’t up for that much walking in the beginning. It was so bad that I started by walking around the swimming pool three to four times. As the summer moved on, I started walking the neighborhood. I would wear my swim suit under my shorts and tank top. I walked the three miles, back in my front door, out my back door onto the screened-in porch. I took off my walking clothes, and in swim suit, walked to the pool, jumped in and swam a few laps. I’m not a great swimmer, but the cooling off in the pool was just what the doctor ordered–well, at least it was what make me feel good and refreshed! 
I learned new little tricks. One was sharing meals at a restaurant rather than eating the whole entrée myself. If I didn’t have anyone to share a meal with, I asked for a container before I started eating and put half the meal in there to take home. If I didn’t ask for the container immediately, I found it was very easy to slip into old habits and nibble away on the food until it was gone. 
to California for two days for this photoshoot. My first response was that I was on vacation in Florida on the dates they wanted me. Heidi said they would fly me from Florida. It wasn’t that easy to me. The dates they wanted me was when I was in Panama City Beach, but the next day we were to drive to Fort Lauderdale. No problem to them—they would fly me from the one location and deliver me back to the other.
they were all satisfied with the work. I changed out of all these clothes, put my jeans, shirt, and sneakers on, and was put back into a car and whisked back to the hotel for a quick lunch.
minutes with this delightful team. I think we laughed our way through this shoot. They were so nice, funny, and we worked hard. 
This is not a one time and “that’s all folks” kind of thing. Watching my weight, keeping it in control, and exercising regularly must be an ongoing activity of my life. This is my lifelong struggle. I know that. When the few pounds inch up again, I need to remember to remove it from the “denial” part of my brain, and stop it in its tracks. This is my new reality. It’s one I think I really like.
