DOWNSIZING
It is very odd. During the first part of our lives many of us marry, have children, buy a house and then fill the house with things for ourselves and our children. It takes a great deal of work, both inside and outside the house, by both partners to do this. We gradually add more and more furniture, more and more photographs and paintings and decorations, even more and more cars.
And then the children begin to leave the home, one by one, and we no longer need three bedrooms or or space for children to play in one way or another. Slowly the house that seemed tight seems bigger and bigger with more unused space until the two of you sit in the living room together in the evening with most of the house empty.
But what do you do with all of the stuff that you have accumulated over the years? At first you do nothing but as you get older and older it becomes clear that no one wants most of what you have so carefully chosen and collected and prized. Much of it contains sentimental memories of things that only the two of your remember, and then when only one is left, no one shares these memories.
At this point your children begin to be apprehensive that they will be left with having to decide what to do with all of this stuff and urge you to do something with it. But you are old and don’t have the energy and while you agree with them that it needs to be done, the objects all still have warm memories for you. So you dawdle until circumstances of illness or an inability to care for your house forces you out of the house to live with your kids or in a retirement home where you will have only one room. Almost everything has to be picked up by one of your kids of disposed of in some way.
And so you do that but the process of disinvestment isn’t over yet because one of these days you will go into longterm care where all you will have is a bed or you will die and take nothing with you.
I think of going to visit my Grandfather Martin Luther Mosher at the age of about 98 in the Mayflower Home in Grinell, Iowa. He and my grandmother, Elva, lived there for many years in a small apartment, but by the time I and my two children stopped to visit him he was in long term care with another man in a small room.
All he had was a bed, but he also, even thought he shuffled around slowly, had his wits about him. After getting up in the morning he would put a piece of plywood on his bed which then became his desk. He was in the process of working on four books which he wanted to publish, one on threats to the survival of the family farm. And he also had a little work place in the basement that he took us down to see. He had always had a number of carpentry projects even as he worked as an agricultural extension agent in Illinois. His latest project was the design and building of a combination wheelchair walker that would stop and be steady when you pushed down on it. He kept it hidden under a cloth cover so that no one could stee his design. He unveiled it very proudly. And then we went upstairs.
We only stayed for the afternoon and never saw him again. He died the next year, two months before reaching 100. He attributed his long life to eating 10% less at his meals each year with the amount that he was reducing his eating each year becoming smaller and smaller so that he would never get down to zero.
That is what I think of when I think of downsizing. Years before he had made a list of everything he and Alva owned with descriptions of the objects and sent it to all the grandkids. But he was far away and this was before I married and before I began to accumulate so I didn’t want or get anything. Later I regretted this because my brothers got very beautiful hand made wooden checker boards that were hollow insid where the checker pieces could be kept. I had been left out. But now it doesn’t matter because everything I have has to go.
The odd thing is that after lusting for things all of my life the lust has gone. I am happy for my kids or grandkids to take anything they want. But they, like I was, want very little.
Now when I travel overseas I find I have everything I need for one month or two months in a carry on bag and one personal bag. I have shifted to digital music, to ebooks, to digital photography and can stream everything I want. That is all that I need for one month and have discovered that what is enough for one month is enough for six months. I sleep on a recliner in the living room which could be half the size it is and still adequate. I have downsized.
But the house is still full and I have to do something with it.
But in the back of my mind my ultimate downsizing is still to come. Even if I manage to get rid of everything in the house and the house itself, the final downsizing will come, not when I only need three feet by six feet in the ground, but because I am going to be cremated I will downsize to a urn of ashes to be spread in various places with a few placed next to Kathe in our joint gravesite.
And that final downsizing means that all my digital photographs and books and music and the reams that I have written will all vanish into thin air. My downsizing will be complete and there will be nothing left, except the gravestone for awhile to indicate that I have been here.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 