In less than a month we’ll be moving into our new house on the ranch. We’re slowly going room to room trying to figure out what we’d like to keep and what we’d like to give away. When we moved from Pasadena to Carmel, we had boxes stacked up on our hearth that we never opened the entire year we lived there. We have a few boxes here in our rental house that we haven’t opened up either. As I look around at all our stuff, I keep thinking I just want to be surrounded by objects I love. I don’t want to keep moving boxes of stuff we’ll never use in a year or that doesn’t make me smile when I see it.  For example, this is the orange teapot I got for my birthday. I drink tea daily, and I’ve been heating my water in the microwave for about two years now. I missed having a pretty tea kettle on the stovetop.

When I was in college my room always looked so sparse compared to other classmates’ rooms. My junior year my friends noticed a chair that was deposited beside the dumpster below my window, and they helped carry it upstairs to my room so they could have a chair to sit in when they came over to visit me.  When I was living in Ventura when I met Stephen, my apartment was pretty sparse then, too. I didn’t have a lot of furniture. I didn’t even have a TV. But it was calming to me to have more open spaces in the rooms I lived in. The more cluttered my house is, the more agitated I feel. Why is it so hard though to let go of things that we really don’t like anyway?

Today is Day 24 of the Write 31 Days series. Other posts in the series can be found here.