In 1992, I was given a little Georgia O’Keefe themed engagement calendar booklet thingy when such, now archaic, novelties were what every sensible person carried around with them. However else would you manage your days if not to write appointments, etc. in ink (a liquid, usually blue, stains something awful)…

As it happened I didn’t use mine to note appointments or meetings or social events—which is probably a story in itself—what I did instead was use it to note the titles of books I wanted to read.

Thing is I rarely consulted the list. I just kept adding to it and when I’d filled the pages I put the booklet in a drawer and began making lists on napkins and pizza flyers. The way you do. (Until someone gives you another little booklet—because it’s just the sort of thing you never walk into a dollar store and buy for yourself.) Recently, however—and it’s only been 19 years—someone did give me a new tiny notebook, which has freed me from pockets full of scribbles and shredded tissue and allows me space to begin making a new list I won’t get around to reading for a decade or two.

In any case, it’s time to say ta ta, Georgia. It’s been a slice and all that, but you’re really just part of the clutter now. (How a heart hardens over time, eh?) The contents of Georgia, however, are gold. But as long as she lives in a drawer, I won’t be aware of that gold.

So I’m listing Georgia’s contents, over at the other blog, a list I can share with friends, et al.  Technology makes this possible, god bless it, while ink—though I’m madly in love with it still—is such a private thing, and where books are concerned, I really think the more ‘sharing’ the better…

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I have too much stuff. I want less. In fact I want what Alix Kates Shulman describes in Drinking the Rain—to find out “how little I need in order to have everything.”

And so as I get rid, I thought I’d commemorate some of the debris with a project—The Stuff Stories—where I try to understand why things that have no real meaning are difficult to part with—like a strange little boy doll in navy blue breeches that I bought during the 80’s. Can’t remember from where or even why, yet every time I try to pitch this unnamed thing that I have no special fondness for, I can’t. (The best I’ve done is getting him into a bag for the Sally Ann once. I dropped it off, drove away, then a kilometre or two later I turned around, went back, opened the bag, fetched him out and drove us back home.) Not sure what this means. But it’s very bloody weird, no?

Happily, I’m old enough to be more curious now about the why of hanging on to these things than to actually keep hanging on to it. Curious also about what there is to learn from the process of disentangling myself.

—And whether or not I’ll ever be able to say goodbye to breeches boy.

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The Stuff Stories, a de-cluttering project of the storied kind.