October 22, 2007
Monday

I could subtitle this piece “Why I’ll Never Have a Clutter-Free Environment.” I did move my large suitcase this morning from the end of the upstairs hallway (where it has been since I finished unpacking it around Labor Day and where it blocks access to Lynn’s room, which hasn’t been used by anyone since her friend McKenna stayed there in August) to the area in front of the fireplace, because I have to start packing again. And I have been sorting and stacking and making decisions about books since my successful poetry gathering project last week. But it’s slow going, and fraught with pitfalls.

I own no fewer than four books on clutter control and personal organization. (I say “no fewer” because that’s how many I can put my hands on at the moment. There might be others residing in some pile or shelf that I haven’t accessed in so long I’ve forgotten I have them.)

Stephanie Culp’s 12-Month Organizer and Project Planner promises to help me map out, tackle, and complete important projects so that I can find time for myself, my family, and my friends. I’ve had that the longest. It has notations from January 1997 for getting desk clutter (files, papers, office supplies, etc.) organized in time for “quiet, no-clock time” alone with Ron while Lynn (then in fifth grade) went to the annual winter church youth group weekend. I do not remember how successful the project was. If it was successful, it certainly needs to be done again. Once every ten or eleven years isn’t too often, is it?

Harriet Schlecter’s Let Go of Clutter tells me I can eliminate clutter and the stress connected to it, purge papers and prevent piles, get rid of sentimental stuff without regret, and manage mental clutter. (There’s mental clutter too?) It has two bookmark flags stuck in it. One is at the “Get Over It” worksheet (where you identify and write about items you regret getting rid of) and the other is at a section entitled “Perpetual Stuff.”

Someone on a discussion list recommended ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life by Judith Kolberg and Kathleen Nadeau. I do not live with a diagnosis of ADD and I would never presume to put myself in the same category with people for whom the condition constitutes a disability. But I know that I have some characteristics common to those who have ADD, particularly in the areas of procrastination and maintaining focus once a task has been undertaken. This is probably the book I have used the most. An “I lost 5 pounds!” bookmark from Weight Watchers is stuck in a section about perfectionist decision blocks.

Finally, I have The Spirit of Getting Organized by Pamela Kristan. This is my favorite. Even the title is poetic. The subtitle is “12 Skills to Find Meaning and Power in Your Stuff.” It tries to engage the spirituality of personal organization (or disorganization). It has writing exercises, visualizations, and meditations for starting and ending a session of decluttering. The bookmark in this is a postcard with Claude Monet’s picture and the thought, evidently from his writing, “Each day I hope for you.” It’s stuck in the chapter about “shedding,” such a gentle word for “getting rid of this junk.” I’ve actually read this book, and done a lot of the exercises, but not put a lot of it into practice.

As I go through my books I do find some that I think I could let go of without regret. For example, Alice McDermott’s After This was a good read, but I will definitely never read it again. That Night was better, and that’s the one I asked her to sign in 2006. I’ve underlined and copied out passages of that and used it as a jumping-off point for a story about events that took place in a neighborhood like mine the summer Marilyn Monroe died. I should definitely dump Lynn Freed’s House of Women, which I didn’t finish and didn’t like even before I knew I didn’t like her, because keeping it serves only to keep me in touch with my anger at her for the way she treated me at Bread Loaf in 2003. Wouldn’t shedding both the book and the anger help me on several levels?

Last week during the poetry roundup I found two books shelved together in my study. One is definitely a keeper. The Wellspring is one of eight titles in my collection by Sharon Olds (her entire published output). In 2005 I carried the seven volumes I owned then to a reading she did in Washington, D.C. Someone in the audience asked her to read a particular sequence, but she said she didn’t have those with her and was afraid she couldn’t recite them well from memory. I was able to produce the volume that contained them, making everyone happy. Olds writes about family love and family pain, about her children, her marriage, her healing from a difficult childhood, and she is, without a doubt, my favorite living poet. The Wellspring is not the one I asked her to sign, but I’ll never let it go.

The other would, under other circumstances, be something I could let go. James McBride’s The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother was good enough but not spectacular. I had it for ten years before I read it in preparation for his appearance at Messiah College last year. Lynn actually read it before I did, when she was a senior in high school taking Advanced Placement English. As I read, I came upon her notations. She has little stars beside certain passages, many of them about Jewish practices (“ask Julie” is written at one), young love, and grieving. She has two large exclamation points beside this passage, which she has also underlined:

I made up my mind then that I was going to leave Suffolk for good. I was seventeen, in my last year of high school, and for the first time in my life I was starting to have opinions of my own. There was no life for me there.

I’ve slipped a bookmark into that page, a postcard of Lucy the Elephant, an attraction in Margate City, New Jersey that my sister and I loved as children and which we have taken our children to. Sharon Olds’s book already had a placemarker. Lynn’s final grade report from eleventh grade (2002-2003) shows that she had straight A’s except for a low B in Honors U.S. History, caused no doubt by the inexplicable failing grade on the final. (I will have to ask her about that.) I placed the grade report, probably the day she brought it home, at “High School Senior”:

For seventeen years, . . .
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there.
. . .
I try to see this house without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, . . .
her pupils dark as the mourning cloak’s
wing, but I can’t.

It’s getting easier to see this house without her, because she hasn’t been here for more than a few hours in a very long time. I’ve gotten pretty good at letting go the child that she was, but I’m not about to let go the books that helped me do it, nor the books that child wrote in as she grew.