Tag Archive for: downsizing

Bidding Farewell to a Dear Friend by Debra H. Goldstein

Bidding Farewell to a Dear
Friend by Debra H. Goldstein

This year, I said good-bye to my personal library. Our
aging physical infirmities and our old house no longer matched. Our new house,
which we can’t believe we built during the pandemic, is perfect for us.
Although there is a guest bedroom and bath upstairs, everything we need is on
the main level.

 

I have a garden room office that lets me have natural light
and look at trees when the writing isn’t going well. My husband, on the other
side of the house, has a man cave that features a television covering an entire
wall. We meet in the middle to eat but have an unspoken rule that those two
rooms are our private sanctuaries – off limits to each other.

 

When we were building this house, I knew from the floor
plans that it lacked the space for me to move my entire library. My library,
which was arranged alphabetically by author, contained sections for biography,
mystery, general literature, children’s, young adult, theater, Judaica and
other religious studies, how-to-books, law books, writing reference books, crime
reference books, cookbooks, and my TBR bookshelf (which usually spread to my
dresser). There were thousands of books. I identified my library as being a
part of me.

 

Giving away my library was akin to giving away one of my
children. I have good memories of when my daughter was 6 and had to count
something for school that would be at least 100. I gave her a pad and pencil
and told her to count books. When I suddenly realized she’d been quiet for too
long, I found her nearing 2000. We decided she could stop counting. My memories
include loaning books to people that introduced them to new authors or answered
questions they posed to me. There were also special

ones that commemorated
events – like the Dr. Seuss one everyone gets for graduation or books that contained
the first published poems of my children.

 

Without flinching, I parted with my dining room furniture
which we’d purchased as a wedding present to ourselves, bedrooms sets, dishes,
pots and pans, and various other pieces of furniture, but the books remained.
It was easy to offer my children any books they wanted to take and to let a
dear friend raid the mystery section. The trouble came with what to do with the
remainder. I vowed to take the children’s books that I might read to my
grandchildren or that they might want to read in the future. I also put aside a
handful of the writing and crime resource books, as well as a few books of
poetry my father and I read together when I was a child. Then, I started making
phone calls. A librarian friend told me about a library in an economically
challenged part of Alabama that had an excess of space, but a limited
collection and a lack of funds. When I called, I knew it was a match made in
heaven.

 

I had movers pack the books I wasn’t keeping in boxes that
could be lifted. Neatly stacked, they filled my dining room and spilled into my
living room. The librarian sent her husband, who owned a flatbed truck, and her
daughter to pick up the books. In the end, most were added to their collection
or were put on a bookmobile. Very few were marked for the Friends of the
Library sale. The empty bookcases found a home, too.

 

It’s been six months and I still feel the loss, but I’m
glad that in a sense, I’m now sharing a part of who I am with others.

Decluttering – The Time Has Come

by Sparke Abbey


This past year we’ve learned a thing or two about decluttering and downsizing. In this era of minimalism, we don’t need as much “stuff” as we might have once believed. And just as we didn’t want to inherit a menagerie of ceramic owls or metal butterflies from our mothers, our children weren’t interested in our amazing book collections, stylish size-seven shoes, or cabbage soup tureen. 



Three garage sales, and more trips than you can count on one hand to local donation centers, we not only decluttered our own homes, we downsized Abbey’s parents’. The process took time, was hard work, yet highly rewarding. And in a crazy way, reminded us of editing or “decluttering” our stories.



Like the rest of America, you’ve certainly heard about Marie Kondo’s “Tidying Up method.” 

  1. Commit yourself to tidying up.
  2. Imagine your ideal lifestyle.
  3. Finish discarding first. Before getting rid of items, sincerely thank each item for serving its purpose.
  4. Tidy by category, not location.
  5. Follow the right order.
  6. Ask yourself if it sparks joy.

Six easy steps, right? Heck, the first two don’t even require physical action. But here’s the reality—the process is never that simple. While the KonMari lifestyle doesn’t “spark joy” for everyone, there are some principals that can be applied to storytelling. So we thought we’d put our spin on Marie’s six steps and create the Sparkle Abbey writing decluttering method.


  1. Commit yourself to unclutter your story. You have to be ruthless. Don’t be afraid to put your writing under a microscope and edit. 
  2. Keep in mind the story you wanted to tell. This will serve as your compass as you unclutter your story. Everything must enhance the story or bring it “joy.” If not, it has to go.
  3. Declutter by category.
    1. Plot – Does your story structure make sense? Are there plot holes? Do your scenes unfold in a way that escalates conflict? Are all the plotlines resolved at the end of the story? 
    2. Subplots – Do your subplots enhance the plot and relate to the overall story goal? Are there too many subplots?
    3. Characters  – Do your characters serve a purpose? Do they have goals, motivation? Do they bring conflict? Are there too many characters? Are the characters unique?
    4. Clarity and Concise – How’s the pacing? Are you showing or telling the story? Is there too much or too little description? Is there too much or too little dialogue? 
  4.  Does your story spark joy? – You’ve carefully decluttered your masterpiece. Does it still bring you joy? It should. Remember step number two. Be careful that you don’t edit the life out of your story.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it’s a good start to tidy up your story. Whether you’re tidying up your home or your writing, the process requires you to make a judgment on what is important and what’s just “stuff” taking up space.


Have you jumped on the “tidying up” wagon? We’d love to hear any tips you have for organizing your home or your story! 

Sparkle Abbey is actually two people, Mary Lee Woods aka Mary Lee Ashford and Anita Carter, who write the national best-selling Pampered Pets cozy mystery series. They are friends as well as neighbors so they often get together and plot ways to commit murder. (But don’t tell the neighbors.) 

They love to hear from readers and can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, their favorite social media sites.Their most recent book is The Dogfather, the tenth book in the Pampered Pets series.
Also, if you want to make sure you get updates, sign up for their newsletter via the SparkleAbbey.com website.

Moving from One Life to Another

by Linda Rodriguez
I am currently in the final, panic-driven stages of downsizing before our final walk-through with the buyers of our house. I feel guilty even taking time to write this blog post because I know I don’t have enough time left, and we’ll be pulling all-nighters to make it. Those are a lot harder when you’re in your late fifties and sixties than they were in your teens and twenties, believe me.

I have packed up boxes of books to give to my sister and my friends, and that’s not too hard. It doesn’t hurt so much to give them away to people I care about. It’s the other boxes, packed to sell, that hurt my heart.

The same thing goes for the fabric for my art quilting. It’s all beautiful, and though I cannily bought much of it on sale, it’s expensive, high-quality fabric and will cost a bundle to replace. But I have reached the limit I set myself for taking to the new house, which is slightly less than half the square footage of our current home but without its copious storage (attics, basement, two-car garage, many built-in cupboards). It was agonizing to choose which to keep and which to let go. I know I should have sold it, but I feel so much better about the bags and bags of gorgeous fabric going to my friends and to an organization I’m deeply involved with.

I’ve already done this hard work with the glassware and china and silver–and with clothes and linens. I’ve been fighting the papers-and-books battle all along, and I suspect they’ll go on to the end. There’s just so much of both categories. I’ve finally finished the fabric and sewing supplies and am now in the midst of the knitting-and-weaving-yarns-and-needles stash, another heartbreaker. Fortunately, a lot of it will go to my daughter and son, and that will make letting go of half of it so much easier. I don’t even want to think about the spinning fibers yet. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

I’m a quadruple Scorpio, and one of the symbols for Scorpio is the phoenix, mythical creature that rebirths itself out of destruction over and over. I’ve always felt that I lived many lives in this lifetime. There was the life that I call Queen of the PTA while I raised my oldest two kids and a foster son. Then there was the life of the divorce years where I went back for degrees and frantically worked multiple jobs to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. Then there was the life of university administrator, running a women’s center and teaching. Etc., etc. I feel now that I’m coming out of the life of cancer patient and getting ready to move into another with this move from my home of 42 years, so here’s a poem for that process.


A PHOENIX, SHE MOVES FROM
LIFE TO LIFE

and leaves only the ashes
of her old self
behind. She plunges into
the dark
future from the glare of
her funeral pyre
that brightens the sky of
her past
for miles and years and
leaves a legend
told to generations of
children
of a vast golden one
whose gleaming
body rose from the
burning corpse,
blotting out the moon
with huge wings beating
against
the burning air to lift
the dead
ground to the living
night sky
and fly through the moon
to a new place with new
people
where she could be new
herself—
until the destroyer
strikes again.

Like a hunting eagle,
she lands, claws
outstretched,
golden crest and feathers
lost
in transit, her wings
already disappearing.
She grows backward,
smaller.
Now she can only crawl
into and out of shallow
holes
in the ground of this new
life.
Still, the wise avoid
trampling her
for they know
she drags death behind
her.

Published in
Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha, 2009)

Linda Rodriguez’s Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel,
based on her popular workshop, and
The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East
,
an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Every Family
Doubt
, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear December 19, 2017. Her three
earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken
Trust
, and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s
Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International
Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices
& Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and
Ragdale and Macondo fellowships.
Her short story, “The Good
Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has
been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP
Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter
of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers
Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International
Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and
Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

Examining the Past

by Linda Rodriguez
We are preparing for the early-August
final walk-through prior to selling our big house and moving to our
new, drastically smaller home in early September. I’ve been
decluttering and downsizing my home of 42 years for months now—in
the midst of final cancer treatments, multitudes of writing/ editing/
teaching deadlines, and the vicissitudes of daily life. So it’s no
surprise that I’ve been revisiting the past lately as I sort through
family belongings and oh-so-many papers.

The first thing that catches my eye is
that I used to do so much. It feels like I’m constantly busy now, but
I’ve had to learn to slow down and say, “no,” because of
autoimmune disease and cancer. My schedule now, packed with deadlines
as it is, is nothing compared to the schedules I used to keep twenty
years ago with a demanding full-time job in higher education
administration, lucrative fiberart and writing commissions on the
side, almost a full-time job as a community volunteer (at one point,
I sat on almost 30 boards), and a grade-schooler, two young adults,
and a husband to take care of at home.

I look at a week’s schedule printed
out, hour-by-hour, to send to my boss to show that I really couldn’t
take on the major project he wanted me to lead, and I shake my head
at days that run from 6:00 a.m. breakfast meetings to late-night
meetings after an evening event with every hour in between packed
with meetings, activities, and events. (Spoiler: I gave in and added
that requested project to my already bursting-at-the-seams calendar.)
What I can’t figure out is how I planned all the programs and wrote
all the speeches, reports, and articles with days like that. Then, I
read a note from one of my graduate interns, joking about a wee-hours
assignment email—“Do you ever sleep?”

Suddenly, I remember that feeling of
running constantly on just a couple of hours of sleep a night. That
feeling of being always a few steps short of complete collapse
whenever the adrenaline would run out. Those were crazy
times—immensely productive but absolutely mad. It’s probably no
wonder that I developed a couple of autoimmune diseases, which are
often triggered by constant stress for too long a period.

I’m locked in another stressful period
now, as I attempt to clear my house of its decades-long collection of
family heirlooms and detritus, so I can start packing for the move to
the new home. It has seemed a Sisyphean task, at moments, as I’ve
tried to fulfill other obligations at the same time, but I’ve made a
point of trying to ensure a decent night’s sleep along the way, and
now, the end is finally in sight. Age brings with it some basic sense
and the realization that we must take care of our bodies and minds if
we don’t want them to rebel against us. Now, I couldn’t handle a
schedule like that weekly one I found among my papers, and rather
than feeling sorry for that, I’m glad I’ve become smart enough not to
try.

Have you had crazy busy times in your
life? Do you find, as you grow older, that you are much more willing
to say, “no,” and set firm limits?


Linda Rodriguez’s Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel,
based on her popular workshop, and The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East
,
an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Every Family
Doubt
, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in autumn, 2017. Her three earlier
Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust,
and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin’s
Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International
Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices
& Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and
Ragdale and Macondo fellowships.
Her short story, “The Good
Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has
been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP
Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter
of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers
Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International
Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and
Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

A Time for Giving… Away

by Linda Rodriguez
It’s 10 days until Christmas—days
when people are shopping and buying presents to give to people who
don’t really need any more stuff to cram into their overcrowded
homes. I have informed my family that I absolutely forbid them to
give me any stuff this Christmas. It’s not that I’ve turned
into Scrooge or the Grinch this year. It’s just that I’m in the
throes of downsizing out of a big old house with three full stories
plus attics and two-car garage, all packed with the stuff of 42 years
of living and raising kids, plus the inherited belongings of several
generations before us.

I have to keep driving past the small
yellow house where we will move once we have cleared out this big old
money pit and sold it to our oldest son, who wants to make the
repairs we can’t afford and rent it out. Seeing the cheerful little
casita to which we’re eventually moving, which has no stairs and
everything brand-new and working just the way it’s supposed
to—plumbing, wiring, cooling and heating, flooring, windows,
appliances—fortifies my will and sends me back to work on my own
version of the Augean stables.

I have sorted out the too-numerous sets
of fine stemware and china, taking boxes of it to my daughter, my
oldest son and his fiancé,
and my sister. Youngest son has driven up to the city to help me pack
boxes and gone back with his car packed to the gills. He’ll return
this weekend to help and take more back with him. I’m on a first-name
basis with the driver for Big Brothers, Big Sisters, since I’ve been
on his pick-up route every week for the last three and he sees I’m
scheduled for weekly pick-ups well into 2017.

The
biggest problems are the books and papers. This is the house of a
writer/editor/teacher and a publisher/editor/scholar. We are drowning
in thousands of books and pounds of papers. My solution, as I try to
move methodically through the house one room at a time, one floor at
a time, has been to start with the books and papers and carry on that
sorting and discarding process every day on a continuous basis while
packing up the things in each room which must go. Ideally, by the
time I’ve finished all rooms on all floors, plus the finished
basement, two attics, and the garage, I will also have finished the
books and papers. (Please don’t laugh at me like that. Allow me my
illusions. They’re all I have to keep me going.)

I
have tried to make lists of what to keep and what to give to family
and what to give away or discard, but I keep finding new things that
are not on any of those lists and having to make decisions all over
again. This leads to odd philosophical questions, such as, How can I
never have anything appropriate to wear when I have so many clothes?,
or What kind of misspent life results in three huge boxes of cups
with the insignia of universities, conferences, and bookstores?, or
How is it that we have four of those huge scholarly collections of
Shakespeare’s plays and poems with essays and footnotes that are
designed for 300-level university Shakespeare classes?, or Where did
all of these old shoes come from?

I am determined to make it easy on us.
I’m doing a first pass through each of the downstairs and upstairs
rooms, packing up and moving out everything that we know we won’t
take with us, thus, no hard emotional decisions right off the bat,
just hard labor. Then, we will have to tackle the difficult
choices—Which of these wedding gifts from dear friends, many of
whom are now gone, will we give away? and Which of the teapots, many
hand-painted or handmade, that my youngest son started giving me
every year from the age of six will I part with? and Which pieces of
furniture from my husband’s grandparents and great-grandparents will
we give up, surely not the china cabinet and rocking chairs that his
great-grandfather made himself?

Surprisingly, I have found that each
box I move out of the house leaves me feeling more positive and
energetic about this massive undertaking. I realize that may change
when the time comes to make those tougher decisions, on teapots, for
example, but right now, I’m feeling great satisfaction every time I
close and tape a box and set it to go to one of the kids or my sister
or to set out for my pal, the Big Brothers, Big Sisters driver. So
wish me luck.

Linda Rodriguez’s book, Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel
is based on her popular workshop. Every
Family Doubt
, her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in June, 2017. Her three earlier
Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust,
and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as Malice
Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina
Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira
Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo
fellowships.
Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,”
published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been
optioned for film. Visit her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com.

Too Much Stuff

With a tip of the hat to the brilliant, much-missed comedian, George Carlin, lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about “stuff.” We’re planning to down-size and move to a smaller house, and my biggest fear is what to do with all this stuff.

Fans well remember Carlin’s famous riff:
That’s all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.

I’m going to skip any of the sentimental attachments that develop when you’ve lived in a house for 20 years. The memories come with you, I keep telling myself.

But OY, the stuff. Consider:

I have my stuff in several boxes marked memorabilia, and includes every drawing made by son number one because after all, he was first born. A few scribbles from son number two, because kids drawings were still a novelty. Apparently son number three and daughter never picked up a pencil because there is nada from them. Plus all their report cards, mother’s day cards, letters from my parents and sister, and probably my high school yearbook, although I haven’t seen it since the last move. There are also cartons of photographs which include duplicates because the drugstore gave you two prints of each photo when they printed them out for you. (Note the archaic concepts in that one sentence: that you didn’t have the photos on a digital memory card, that there was someplace called a drugstore, and that someone other than yourself was printing them out). See, getting rid of stuff means getting rid of the old ways of thinking too.

There are separate boxes of my husband’s memorabilia, although he’s not quite the sniveling ball of sentiment that I am.

There is memorabilia accumulated by each of the kid. For example, I have playbills from the sixth grade production of My Fair Lady. Keep in mind that I sat through all six performances, plus two dress rehearsals, of this musical. Son number one had exactly one line (which I can still repeat): “Mr. Doolittle to see you, sir.” How many copies of that playbill does he need? Also in these boxes are complete collections of all soccer, baseball, hockey, baseketball, “you didn’t win, but you still get a tiny trophy because everyone’s a winner in our town,” fake brass awards times four.

But let’s move beyond my stuff, hubby’s stuff, kids stuff. When parents downsize their homes, you inherit their stuff. When my mother-in-law moved from her home of 40 years to an apartment, she couldn’t bear to donate her late husband’s fishing equipment. There probably isn’t a charity dedicated to underprivileged fly fishermen. On the other hand, these ancient rods and reels have now taken on mythic proportions in my not so-sentimental husband’s memories, so we could move to a studio apartment and in one corner would be three fishing rods and a tackle box. This from the man who hasn’t gone fishing in 10 years – and didn’t use his Dad’s stuff then.

And sadly, when your parents die, and you have to break up their homes, you make snap decisions on their “stuff,” that you then have to live with. For example, consumed by grief when our mother died, my sister took Mom’s pink hairnet. Three months later, with a little clearer perspective, she asked me what the heck she should do with it. It certainly wasn’t the essence of our mother, but it now seemed tacky to discard it. As my sister pointed out, “now that I’ve taken it, I’ve got it,” followed by a heavy sigh.

I admire those who can pare down their belongings to two sets of clean underwear and a change of shirts. I understand their world view that they can more clearly see what’s important and what’s not without stuff weighing them down. I can’t pare it down that much for a weekend trip, let alone a move. I know the concept of dumping all this “stuff” might be liberating, but it’s also exhausting.

What are you doing with your stuff?

Evelyn David