Downsizing

As I recently wrote, our real estate agent asked us to remove our personality from the rooms of our home as we readied it for sale.  On the surface of things this task was made easier by the fact that we were moving "our stuff" into a space considerably smaller and already half furnished, so we really had no choice but to--and here I use the trendy word--"downsize."  When you are in old age, everything is about downsizing, including your stature; I who once measured in at 5' 9 1/2" now stand meagerly at 5' 6".  I have had some experience of downsizing in the last decades, personally and sympathetically.  It all began when I was divorced and moved my own things from a fifteen room house in Brookline, Massachusetts, that I had shared with my family for long enough to build up a stash of treasures typical of the anally retentive personality.  The upstairs apartment of my newly purchased two family house in Cambridge simply could not contain what I wanted to bring to it, and so I was a frequent visitor to Goodwill for months on end.  Years went by and I was joined by another man, soon to become my husband, for whom I took over the downstairs apartment and we were back to fifteen rooms, three or four thousand books, walls of paintings, an entire room given over to clothes.  He bristles if I call him a pack rat, so I will say it here, and perhaps he will not read this, usually does not, tired as he is just from my talking to him (at him?) at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  In any case, at this time I got a serious lesson in downsizing when my sister in Woodstock New York had to enter a nursing home permanently, and I had to empty her house where she had lived for four decades.  In her later years there she had not been able to manage the stairs so the upstairs rooms and closets were dust covered stashes of just everything that she had casually told visitors and cleaners to take up there.  I trembled and teared up as I went through the mess, identifying again and again the evidence of glory days and tragic days, days of sadness, days of laughter; it was all there under the grey-brown dust. Downstairs, sorting through her papers, her books, her clothes, I was stymied by what to save, where to save it, knowing that she would never leave her new place of residence again, and yet that she was completely sentient, and wanting things.  Like the framed Chinese prints which she angrily insisted were being stolen from her by my son when he casually and kindly mentioned that he would find them a home.  At the same time I was busy helping my daughter clean out her grandmother's country property--house and barn--which had been in the family since 1735.  If you wanted to see impressive clutter, go through a generational history contained in the closets and barn storage areas of this place, from Philadelphia Chippendale dining room chairs that were a gift from Benjamin Franklin to a mahjong set from the Dowager Empress in Beijing to a box of Christmas cards received evidently during the decade of the seventies.  Months went by agonizing over the destination for all this what I in exasperation sometimes called "crap."  Then my ex-wife died and I helped my daughter clean out her stuff, and then Richard and I moved out of fifteen rooms in Cambridge to a five room apartment, and from that into a little condo in Sarasota Fl along with a weekend house treated suddenly as our main residence in Hull Massachusetts.  Now we are leaving the latter and concentrating everything into the Florida property amplified by the purchase of the condo next door.  There are fifty paintings, more than a thousand DVDs, hundreds of books, and, you know, I thought we had thrown out almost everything in the last few years, but discover that I am a sucker for Brooks Brothers knit boxer underwear.  I could outfit the US Army!  We are working night and day removing our damn personalities from the place.  Oh, antiseptic is hard to achieve, but we'll get there!