If I'm Charlie, who's Winnie?

Winnie was my beautiful, wonderful, smart, caring, highly-cluttered Gran.

 

As a child, I loved going to my grandparents' house. It was a place of wonder with treasures and trinkets everywhere you looked. I could fit through all the pathways with ease and hide myself in any corner of any room to explore what I found there.

Lunch was always two different cans of soup mixed together and canned ham sandwiches on homemade whole wheat toast. I felt cocooned by things and routine every time we visited.

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As a kid I wasn't paying attention to the work involved in moving all the pots and pans, papers and napkins off the stove before lunch could be prepared safely. I didn't realize my mom always volunteered to fetch the cans of soup from the cellar because the narrow pathway between piles on the basement steps was dangerous for my grandparents, and she wanted to ensure the cans she chose hadn't expired years earlier.

Now, for someone who hoarded, my grandmother had an INCREDIBLE capacity for organization, and an amazing memory. Everything was neatly piled on all available flat surfaces, and there were many because Winnie loved a shelving unit. But never fear, in the absence of a shelving unit, where floor meets wall makes for a perfectly good shelf, as do stairs. Countertops, window ledges, the space undernear a tiny chair-side table. The woman was nothing if not resourceful. And she seemed to, at least, know where everything was. She was able to function in her highly cluttered home far better than most people could have. It was organized chaos to an extreme. In fact, up until her cognition began to decline slightly in her early 90s, years after my grandfather died, she lived there independently with very few issues.

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At that point, when moving to a smaller, more manageable residence in town was the only option that made sense, decluttering and downsizing my grandmother's home of 35 years fell onto my father. My grandmother wanted to be involved, but it was SO hard for her to let things go, and A LOT needed to go. Everything had value, everything had a story. I have vivid memories of sitting with her, a box on my lap, painstakingly going tiny item by tiny item, listening to her stories and trying to reason with her as to why she could perhaps let even one figurine go. I loved it. I was in my element, though as an undergraduate student at the time had no knowledge of the psychology of clutter issues or how to really help her learn to let go. Progress was slow, and time moves fast. As the time passed her son saw no choice but to do more and more without her by his side.

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It took my father six months -- full time! -- to clear out my grandmother's home. She was lucky to have a caring son with that kind of available time to devote, and it was all amazingly civil. That's not often the case. She did have to eventually step back entirely. It was the only way forward. She knew things had to go but she couldn't make the decisions and she couldn't bear to watch it happen. I think it went as well as it could have under the circumstances and in the end, she loved her simpler living arrangements in her new home. Still, almost every time my parents visited there were questions about where many of her belongings had ended up. She lamented the loss of many of her things because, in the end, she didn't know what happened to it all. She had lived in an unedited environment for as long as anyone could remember, amassing without letting anything go. She prided herself on putting out one single grocery bag of garbage every week, but in the end her son took daily (sometimes twice daily) pickup truck loads of garbage to the dump for months on end. No one mentioned this to my grandmother because it would have broken her eco-conscious heart.

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So many of her wonderful things she never got to fully enjoy, and many of them had been stocked away for so long that no one else could or would get any enjoyment out of them when they were finally unearthed. 

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In the end, her decluttering was done for her, when she would have liked to do it herself. Problem was, she never learned how. My mission is for other people to be able to experience decluttering Winnie's Way, the way she would have wanted to know if she knew such a way existed (say that three times fast!). To be taught how to say goodbye to belongings without feeling like you're giving in or giving up. To feel in control and to experience the joy of confidently editing your surroundings so that you can live easier in your home and enjoy your time, your people, and all your favourite things to the very fullest.

Not the way people with a bend towards tidyness try to teach the messy-minded, but what I lovingly call Winnie's Way. Methods that really work for people who really struggle to let things go.

 

Get ready to be surprised. I know she would have been.