I’m not exactly a hoarder… but I do find it difficult to throw things away; I’m not talking about rubbish because I’m really good at throwing refuse away, of recycling paper, metals, plastics, glass,compostable kitchen waste, food waste into the food waste bin, unwanted clothes to charity shops; I’m brilliant at using left-overs and being creative of gluts of fruit and vegetables… but things, actual things… that’s my downfall.
It’s not just the Christmas and birthday cards my children and husband and special friends have sent, or tickets for gigs I’ve been to; it’s books I’ll never read again, CDs I’ll never listen to… although I am getting better at giving them to charity shops. It’s things which I remember from my childhood, or my children’s childhood, or my parents’ home, or my parents-in-law’s home…
I really try now to not do it – hang onto what is basically junk… although many people coming into our house would be appalled at the amount of stuff we have… I dream of being minimalist, but I fear I never will be!
Part of this clinging on is having been brought up not to waste anything, to use and re-use things until they really were worn out and beyond repair. Part of it is a sort of sentimentality.
However… I try… and here is an example. I inherited all the kitchen equipment that was in my parents’ house. I also had all my own kitchen utensils and tools and pans from having my own home for twenty odd years. I went to get the cheese grater out of the cupboard, and sitting beside my shiny newish one were two others, my mum’s and my mother-in-law’s. What was the point of me keeping them? They were exactly the same as mine, but old, dull, slightly skewiff, much used and rather battered. But they belonged to people I love! I could remember from my earliest childhood mum grating cheese to make macaroni cheese, egg and bacon flan, cheese sauce… holding or even just looking at the grater I could see my mum so vividly. But this is ridiculous! You don’t need a cheese grater to remember mum, I told myself, and next time we visited a charity shop the graters went too.
We used to have a tomato knife; it had a rounded, red wooden handle and a finely serrated blade which could cut tomatoes into the thinnest slices. I think the handle fell off… or the knife got lost when we moved house, or it just disappeared as things do, but whatever happened to it I no longer have it, just as I no longer have the grater… but the strange thing is, when i think of the tomato knife or the grater, all those memories of my mum still flood back, just as if I had the item here in front of me!
I might have thought, well, I’ll keep whatever it is, my children will know that it belonged to their grandparents… they might know that, but they would just see a batted old item, and it would be meaningless to them because it has no memories attached to it… the memories are still hr, bright and alive, even though the item has gone… but the memories of the knife and grater are here too!
Lois Elsden 