Deaccessioning

And the liberation of letting go

Why put off for today what you should’ve already done yesterday?

– my Virgo wife

In mid-March, Amy Lee had a big idea. Let’s start packing now. The thinking was no one climbs Everest in one go – you summit in stages. By going room to room, drawer by drawer, we’d pare down our belongings and establish a new base camp of Airbnb-level minimalism. Moving is radical enough. Why not acclimatize ourselves to the reality of less things right here at home first before subjecting ourselves to the shock of it across an ocean.

There will be no rented storage unit, no shoving of shit into grandma’s garage. We’ve allotted two spaces in our home for things to keep: a large loft/attic and a diminutive under-the-stairs room, the sort of which might house a Hogwarts student. The choices quickly became Fit it, Sell it, or Give it away. By late-March, we’d weeded out extraneous furniture, secondary kitchenware, and tertiary appliances. Do we need four muffin pans and seven cutting boards for ninety days? We learned in high school chemistry that a gas expands to fill any volume. We learned in our kitchen last week that if you tuck the giant baking trays away, sheet-pan dinners shrink, too. Smaller portions and less waste at times of more stress and reduced workouts has its benefits.

Pasta roller stayed, ice cream maker went into a box, air fryer sent to a kid at college. Online marketplaces and a high-traffic corner up the block became our ‘yard sale.’ A wine rack sold in a jiffy, but when the West Elm desk didn’t move and Goodwill wouldn’t take a banged-up Ikea dresser, off to the corner they went with a FREE sign. A car stopped to browse and they were gone the next day, along with a mod vintage chair that I’d cherished for twenty-five years.

Tired of pulling against the inertia of past, I fell for the promise of a frictionless near-future. Offsetting the heaviness of attachment – But granddad gave me this… The kids made that… – is the lightness of letting go. Amy Lee and I reduced bins and bins of sentiment and ornament to but one each under the dicta of Enjoy it one more time, Keep, or Just snap a pic for the digital archives. To loosely quote Petty and Nicks, “Stop dragging my kindergarten art around.”