The Next Day...

So I've been trying to get all the deets together to create this website. It's pretty straightforward, but does require a little tech finesse. So it's pretty clunky right now. But I really am itching to get started. Or chomping as it were.

Today I am updating some of the several projects I am working on. It can seem to be a lonely job, but I am excited to meet new contacts and ideas with this online project to help with my written projects. Social connectedness is so important to, well, anything worthwhile that we do.

I am working on a play that features hoarding vs the collection of a lifetime of memorabilia and how that affects the offspring of aging parents. Who gets to choose what stays and what goes? Even coming to an agreement about letting go of things in the first place is hard. What kinds of connections do we have with our things? Are we driven to acquire more and more or is that a habit we can control? Or is it a cultural practice where we just buy things, and in our way support the economy.

In our hearts, we know we don't need a whole lot of stuff, but it really does feel good to surround ourselves with creature comforts.

My daughter, who lives alone (with the help of caregivers since she is paralyzed) has spent a lot of energy trying to outfit her home at age 22 to have all the comforts and features of our home which reflects 40+ years of cohabitation. What is that impulse? Familiarity and ease? Just what she knows? I love what she has done on some level, on another I wish she would ease into it, adding things as her experiences embolden and offer. But who am I to judge? I am at a point in my life where I am trying to offload rather than acquire.

And that offloading is proving very difficult, hence the play I'm writing. An outsider would come into my home and easily identify things that could be offloaded today. But could I do it? It's not that the things are so sentimental, but that I am so used to how they define my living space. Ok, it is sentimental, the memories and all. But the other piece is how I've let these things define my days. It's like that empty feeling you get when you take down the Christmas tree and all the decorations... they were extra to begin with, but leave such an empty space when they go. But, we all adjust, don't we?

The question then is, what to keep, what to let go? And when? While we can't take it with us, we can enjoy it while we are here, in the time we have left.

In my play, the kids (in their 40s) return to the family home to find it overrun with stuff. The kids have their own agendas about what to do with it, but mostly want to get it out of their lives now, not wait till their parents die, thinking it would help de-clutter all of their lives... but does it? The parents are attached to their things, bur maybe not in the ways their kids assume. So where do mementos, clutter, memory, joy and overwhelm intersect? Souvenir, french for to remember, from the Latin for coming to mind... is linguistic evidence of how things enhance and support memory.

Does anyone else wonder what to do about the family accumulations? What will happen when your parents go? Or you and how your kids will manage when the prior generation and their connections to their souvenirs are gone? While we don't think we define ourselves by our things, in many ways... we do ....