If you’ve been browsing the Hollin Hills Forum lately, you may now be the proud owner of three used extension cords, a package of extra-fine steel wool, a jar of Maille whole-grain mustard, and possibly a used sword scabbard.
No? What about the opened carton of almond milk, the 3-ring binder (empty), the slightly battered set of bocce balls, the life-sized stuffed dog, or the tumbling composter – all being given away free to the first person who asks?
Still no? Well … maybe that’s because you’re too busy giving things away yourself. Because seriously, there’s a frenzy of freeganism going on in Hollin Hills these days. Between spring cleaning, recycling, moving and general de-cluttering, we’re passing boatloads of stuff back and forth every day – and anything your heart desires is probably sitting at the end of someone’s driveway at this very moment, just waiting for you to cart it away.
What’s behind this great give-away? The natural generosity of Hollin Hillers is a big part of it, as well as a genuine commitment to recycling. And of course there’s the great bugaboo of Hollin Hills houses, our perennial lack of closet space. But Spring itself gets some credit, too; Nature is doing her annual reboot, and we can’t help but join in. We throw open our windows, breathe in the fresh air, and gleefully toss out the year’s accumulated sludge. Fire up the incinerators! We’ll keep only what sparks joy, as Marie Kondo instructs us, and trash or give away the rest. We’ll rid our homes of everything we do not “know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,” per William Morris. And, as the philosopher Gwyneth Paltrow advises, we will curate a lifestyle for ourselves, shorn of all dross and excess, and beautified with goop. Ours will be a pure and light-filled world, pared to its essentials, where every day is a fresh start, every moment is mindful, and we live, more or less, like the angels.
But first, there’s The Black Hole of Despair to deal with.
the black hole: be very afraid
We have a Black Hole, and maybe you do, too: the spare bedroom where stuff goes to die. You know the story: The last child moves out, their room is turned into an “office,” and the descent into chaos begins. It starts slowly, almost imperceptibly. You store an old VHS player in there (because it works fine, and who knows, Blockbuster might come back one day). And why throw away those pants? They haven’t fit since the last century, but your waistline will return someday, right? And that broken toaster fits nicely under the desk for now, just waiting until you get around to fixing it. And you can’t throw out that hardcover of Middlemarch, it’s a classic, for God’s sake. And sure, maybe that piece of art was a mistake, but life is too short for regret. Anyway, look: there’s still some wall space left!
And so it goes, the gradual accretion of the useless, the neglected, the outlived and the unloved, bits of stuff condemned to a twilight world where they’re no longer part of your life, but not ready for the graveyard, either. And the room fills and fills and fills, until the decisive moment when the Peloton – that once-noble beast – is squeezed into the last remaining scrap of space and abandoned. It is the end; critical mass has been achieved, even light cannot escape, and cleaning the room is no longer imaginable. So you close the door, realizing with horror that The Stuff has won, and that you’ve created a monument to your own indecisiveness that will mock you for the rest of your days.
Congratulations, and welcome to the club.
redemption arrives, aged two
But thankfully for us, redemption arrived one morning in May, when our eldest announced that she would be flying in from Sweden with husband and 2-year-old daughter, and expected (as young mothers do) a habitable room to stay in, where toddlers would not be crushed under piles of old Dwell magazines and National Geographics.
So we sharpened our machetes, steeled our souls, and forced our way into the Hole. And let me tell you, it wasn’t pretty. There were tears. There was, at first, actual despair. But as we hacked away at the avalanche of stuff, we found we were starting to … enjoy ourselves. Like savage, wild-eyed animals of tidying, we began throwing things out with abandon, reclaiming the floor space that was rightfully ours. Out went the forgotten sweaters and mouldering jackets, cleaned and consigned to Goodwill. Old books went to the old book place, outdated computer gear made it onto eBay, and the Peloton (not actually a Peloton, we are cheapskates) found a new home by a window, where we might actually want to use it. The more presentable stuff was given away on the Forum, while the rest – junk we were embarrassed to admit we even owned – was quietly trashed in the dark of night.
And with each bag to the trash, each trip to the landfill, we became more and more the masters of our own destiny. We were rising up against The Stuff, throwing off its despotic yoke, and it was exhilarating. And when, in an impossibly comic moment, we actually came across an old copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (under a basket that contained, among other things, a daughter’s belly button ring from high school), we knew that victory would soon be ours. Our lives were transforming, as Kondo had said they would. We were experiencing the near-spiritual joy of just … letting everything go.
a stuffed frog comes to light
And then, like archeologists, we stumbled across an amazing find. Hidden away at the back of a closet was an ancient taxidermied frog, maybe six inches tall, stuffed with sawdust and glued to a toy string bass, as if it were playing it. Nothing, really; a cheap tourist souvenir that my mother had brought back from Mexico for me, maybe sixty years ago. But like Proust and his madeleine, I suddenly remembered that day and how awed I’d been by this strange and magical thing, redolent of death and music and a world much darker than I had realized. It’s stayed with me ever since, one of the last remaining artifacts from my childhood. It’s neither beautiful nor useful, it doesn’t particularly “spark joy,” and you won’t find it in our living room (I promise). But the thing still awakens something important in my distant childhood heart, and if the house were burning down, I’d probably run through the flames to save it.
So maybe that’s the real point of cleaning: to discover, in the chaos, the things that actually matter to us. Things need to live, to be part of our lives. We trace our own history in them, these objects that mean “home” to us and reflect back to us who we are. And anything that doesn’t do that is just blocking the view – so why keep it? Paring down could be the key to seeing the meaning in our lives, and Charles Goodman may have done us a favor when he skimped on the closet space in these houses of ours, dragging us kicking and screaming into the light of our own lives.
Anyway, enough philosophizing. To finish the story: the Black Hole was vanquished, the daughter arrived and declared herself content, and the two-year-old was set free to roam. It’s fascinating to watch her explore this fresh new universe of things she’s in, picking up everyday objects, examining them thoughtfully, then passing them to one of the adults before moving on to the next. Everything delights her, from ants to sunglasses to indelible pens. The world feels infinitely rich and generous to her, and she is infinitely generous with it. She lives weightlessly, unstuck to things, completely at home in the universe and a friend to all.
She is living, for this glorious moment in her life, as we all would: like the angels.
– Stephen Brookes