Spring: Time to shed some weight

For the last two weeks I’ve been apologizing to everyone who enters my house. Just inside the front door, I have transformed our dusty and useless dining room into a staging area for my latest project.

Stacked chest high are boxes of maternity clothes, piles of toys, collections of glassware, half used bottles of hair tonics and anything else that has no overriding functional or emotional purpose in our lives.

I started 2009 seeking to be lean. Now, with the green grass of spring I’m trying again to lighten the load. I recently watched my neighbor downsize her family of six into a smaller house. Now I want to do almost the same thing: downsize the stuff, keep the house.

My friend Sandy calls this a pretend move. I love this idea.

The process of packing, hauling, unpacking and relocating every single item you possess quickly clarifies the wisdom of saving a half-used bottle of four-year-old sunscreen or Grandma Olga’s nightgowns accepted while grieving after her funeral.

To provide a deadline for this project, I volunteered to host a multi-family rummage sale. This is actually more motivating than a closing date with a banker – rummage salers case your joint the night before a sale and begin collecting their purchases at the slightest sign of daylight.

My kids are absorbed in the project too. On the sales block are some precious toys they know will fetch a good price. The two oldest are laying claim to baby things they are convinced were theirs. Our youngest, on the other hand, is suddenly attached to toys he lasted touched when he was toothless.

My daughter even asked this weekend if she could sell a large chunk of bark she found. “Sure,” I said mindlessly. “How much do you think someone will pay for it mom? Three dollars?”

Money is certainly their motivation, but mine is altogether different.

My oldest sister gave me the book “Gift from the Sea” for my 40th birthday. First written and published in 1955 by Ann Morrow Lindbergh (the wife of Charles Lindbergh), “Gift from the Sea” offers Lindbergh’s thoughts on balancing life, work and relationships.

The mother of five lived in a different era, yet her struggle to find balance in life parallels that of women today. The book is the product of Lindbergh’s hiatus by the sea away from her family.

At the sea, she discovered and began to shed what was unnecessary to her. Clothes first – she needed only a few light pieces. This spread into the shedding of vanity. She simplified her shelter, needing no heat, no telephone, very little furniture or decorations. This spread into the shedding of pride and material possessions.

She also shed hypocrisy in relationships and her mask of insincerity. She didn’t need these when she was with her best, most trustworthy friends.

In the end her challenge was not how much, but how little she could get along with.

I remember standing in my friend’s garage before she moved. One-third of it was full of items she planned to shed. Another third were things for indefinite storage. And the final pile, probably the smallest, contained their necessities for daily living.

It’s amazing what we collect, even more amazing why. Standing in my dining room the stuff surrounding me feels heavy and rather suffocating. I’m excited to shed some of it and to be more disciplined in the future to ask, as Lindbergh did, before accumulating more things to manage, “Is it necessary?”