On Sorting, Nostalgia, Identity, Memory, Meaning, and the Nature of Existence, or, Spring Cleaning

in which I work at decreasing the amount of stuff I hang on to

A cluttered desk, not my own. But if I unleashed everything in the boxes I’m sorting, you’d get this.

Greetings, friends.

I feel it’s been too long since I wrote. I haven’t had anything that seemed to need saying. Still don’t. But, since the purpose (for now) of this newsletter is, in part, to get me writing more often and easily, I’m setting off from the pier of not-saying-a-thing into the lake of saying whatever comes up.

Thank you in advance for coming along. From here, I can’t say whether it’ll be a quick zip across the water with the motor at full throttle or a slow paddle where we explore hidden coves and inlets and peer up into treetops and down into pools.

It’s a cloudy, mild day in Deer Park. The snow has the rot-ty feel of spring, sinking deeper underfoot after a series of days that were mild, sunny, breezy, or all three. In many ways, I’m reluctant for winter to end. I love winter’s dramas and solitude, its beauty and quiet, its clear, cold nights and extra-sparkly stars. I especially appreciate the way winter seems to make time slow down. Plus, the short days make me feel justified in curling up on the couch early in the evening and dozing while episodes of Vera play in the background.

Recent visitors include:

Here my mind goes blank, and I decide to call any visit by anyone in the past month ‘recent.’

A few weeks ago, a flock of Evening Grosbeaks visited the feeder.

I also saw the tracks of rabbits and otters in the woods over the last few weeks. Despite always being on the lookout, I haven’t seen otter tracks in at least six years. Otters make long, broad impressions as they move on their short-limbed, long bodies, which always makes me picture the creatures upright on their hind legs, like Toad in Wind in the Willows. I imagine them wearing embroidered woolen vests (red) and pulling small sledges, going about some business that seems bound to be festive.

What I’ve been up to:

Sorting. I’m working my way through (part of) a lifetime’s worth of papers, books, letters, manuscripts, and other items too numerous to mention.

It seems time to reckon with my stuff and myself. So, many days I troop into the cabin next door where much of it is stored, and I stare at the piles and zip my down coat snugger up under my chin, preparing to be brave and resolute.

Yesterday I sat at my desk with a pile of letters in front of me. My mom’s handwriting on an envelope leaps up at me. I pull the note out. She tells me of a cardinal at the feeder and a visit to a sick friend. She reminds me that she loves and misses me. My eyes fill with tears, and I ease the note back into its holder.

There are hundreds of these notes, thousands. I went to college at almost eighteen; my mom died when I was forty-seven. She wrote me at least once a week for most of that time. Now she’s gone, and the sight of her handwriting makes my heart clutch with gratitude and grief. And hers are not the only precious letters. I have letters from my dad, who died in 1997. Notes from my grandmothers. Letters from my siblings and friends, letters from diner customers, letters from readers. Each one brings some kind of memory roaring along with it, most of them good. Good and also bittersweet.

Along with letters, I have a lifetime’s worth of journals, manuscripts, notebooks of to-do lists (often more evocative of times past than journals), poems I printed out, cartoons I found funny, notes from college classes, receipts I thought I might need. (These are also often more evocative than journals. “Oh, yeah. I remember buying that shoe caddy, thinking that at last, I would get my life organized.”)

But now, I yearn to decrease the amount of paper in my life. I must. It feels imperative.

I’ve spent many days looking at letters. Some, I keep. Many I put in a box to burn. Burning seems the only thing to do with such items. There is something spiritual in it, or that’s what I tell myself. Throughout the winter, I have managed to carve the stock of letters down by half. The hardest to let go of are those from my family. I mailed some letters back to the friends who wrote them, hoping they haven’t saved mine and won’t ship them back to me.

Other days have been consumed by reading old journals. Into the burn pile stacks of these go.

On yet other days, I make my way through crates of books. Some go to Goodwill; a few go into a box to be sent to a friend’s bookstore in the spring.

I say, out loud, repeatedly, “I’m making real progress! I feel good about this! Things are getting better!”

Something about my insistence makes me suspicious.

The truth is that looking at and through the stacks of books and papers in boxes and crates, I’m depressed. I feel like a disorganized, sad mess. How did this happen? What does it say about me?

It usually takes me a little while to begin. What do I do? Where do I start? An inner voice murmurs to just start anywhere. And to let some things go if I can.

What’s gone so far:

• 99% of my notes from college. Decades ago, I packed them into a banana box and hoisted them up into the attic over our garage. I found it impossible to toss them each time I checked in with them. Partly, it was pride in the accomplishment they proved. I attended the University of Michigan, and I did well there. I earned good grades, and I took challenging classes: chemistry, calculus, biology, statistics. Page after page of notebooks is filled with precise, tiny handwriting that I no longer recognize. The box was also proof that any of it ever happened. And the notes bring back memories. Not so much memories of what I learned: I solved those quadratic equations? But memories of how happy I was. I tromped around campus, lugging a backpack stuffed full of textbooks. I enrolled in courses, studied early and late, and planned for a bright future. I made friends. I sat at the Student Union drinking fizzy water and studying for economics exams with them. If the notes went away, it seemed that the tactile memories of those times and the proof it offered me that I was smart—something that once meant a lot to me—might go too. It seemed that way until, one day last November, it didn’t. Smart and five dollars will get you a good cup of coffee. And I finally didn’t need the pieces of paper anymore to tell me that I went to college, learned a lot, and loved it. And whatever intelligence I have now doesn’t depend on what was in that banana box. Finally, there’s less to prove. So off the box went to recycling.

• 39% of my journals. Burned up! Yes! I can’t describe how freeing and right it feels as the pages crinkle and flame. Here’s a line from a pretty cheerful novel set at the end of the world by Carolyn See (Golden Days) that does it pretty well: This is my past; I bless you and release you.

• A lot of old sheets with thin spots and tears. In the days when people made rag rugs, these were useful. They could still be useful as cleaning rags. But I have plenty of rags and don’t make rugs, and I’m never going to, no matter how much a part of me thinks, “But that’s who I really am!”

• Ditto all of the above on a lot of sad old clothes. Rag rugs they could have made. Maybe even quilts. But clothes? No. Even if times get very tough, I have enough sad old clothes to get by.

• 14% of my books. Yes, I’m making these numbers up; no, I haven’t counted them or kept track of how many we’ve carted off to the thrift shop. But the answer is: many.

• Assorted odds and ends. It seems embarrassing and shameful to list them, so I won’t. And yet, it is also not embarrassing or shameful. There is something so human about this, I think. Or at least a particular sort of human.

I muse over the meaning of all this as I toil. Where did it all come from, how is it still here, and what caused this?

I’ve been busy for a long time; that’s part of it. During the decades of running our diner, I was too busy to deal with the rest of my life in any organized way. But now we’ve sold the restaurant, and while I’m still busy, I’m not as busy. As I ponder, the list of causes gets long and then longer again:

• Along with busyness, there was business. Businesses create paper, especially if you haven’t climbed onboard the train of digitalized everything.

• Being a writer. Writing creates. Horrific. Amounts. Of paper.

• Being creative. I see so many possibilities in things. This sturdy plastic box that held 6-inch construction screws would make such a useful box for putting something in; it has to. This beautiful card could be cut into a postcard. (Full disclosure, I do a lot of that.) These tiny pencil stubs could become….something.

• Living in a remote spot. Everything you touch could come in handy someday, and its replacement costs money and is a minimum of thirty miles away. (And, all too often, about two days after I pitch something out, I want it back. Happened today.)

• Coming from a rural background. I descend from people who sewed quilts made out of old clothes, people who never bought packages of rags at Menards but instead made their own from worn flannel shirts and old towels.

• My lower middle-class background and my parents’ disinterest in modernity or fashion. Bless them; they thought nothing of sending us to school in mismatched, ill-fitting, out-of-date hand-me-downs. They didn’t have much money, and even if they had, it would not have dawned on them to prioritize our wardrobes, not when we were young, anyway. I’m grateful now for that grounding in not-terribly-materialistic values, but it may have left me with a smidgeon of a scarcity mindset. In fairness, our wardrobes weren’t horrific. But they weren’t great. And I think I somehow got the feeling there might never be enough of anything, even though there always was. More on that later. (Maybe.) Or another time. (Maybe.)

Still, each item is proof of life, proof of love, proof of risks and hopes and ideas. I try to listen to an inner voice as I sort. What should I do with this? And this? And that?

One thing that hasn’t gone is a black clutch purse that belonged to my mother. I found it alluring as a child. It spoke of adulthood, sophistication, and mystery. I found it in her bureau after she died; she can’t have used it in decades, so I suspect it hinted at the same things to her. It still held a short pencil, a folded plastic rain bonnet, and a dime.

I told myself to put this purse in the Goodwill box. I did put it there several times. “Mom is not in the purse!” I reminded myself. And she isn’t. She really isn’t. But I removed the purse from the Goodwill box anyway.