Moving: What Marie Kondo Didn't Mention

The top three stress-escalating life events are death of a loved one, divorce and moving. Okay, I’m moving and in the middle of a breakup that has all the elements of death, so I win the stress trifecta!  Fine, everyone has bad days. Also weeks and months. What I failed to realize is that the emotional mess is a freaking picnic compared to the reality of moving your own accumulated ton of junk.

Marie Kondo has made a fortune by simply repackaging William Morris’s famous, century and a half-old advice, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”  Kondo laid on some contemporary embellishment by saying, “Keep only those things that speak to the heart,” and then talking about categories. I didn’t buy the book but understood the general idea well enough to impose it on the task at hand. Except it doesn’t work.

Books

“Heart” of course is just a metaphor for “brain,” and I own no book that fails to speak to mine. Donating six carloads of them to the library was like having major surgery without anesthesia, but I still have too many!  It took 4 beefy movers an hour to haul them up the steps to my apartment and stack them to the ceiling in a closet that now may collapse under their weight into the apartment below. It won’t matter because it’s a utility/coat closet so nothing will perish down there except my neighbor’s Roomba and three cases of smuggled Mexican mezcal he sells from his car in the parking lot of a trendy yoga studio. But I only have one bookcase.  What am I gonna do with all these books?

Kitchen Stuff

This one was easy. Cookware says nothing to my heart, so I brought 1 small saucepan, 2 miniature skillets and 1 serrated paring knife from a collection of 18. That’s all. Eventually I’ll order a 9-inch frying pan with a lid from Amazon because it’s impossible to find one in stores. The ice cream maker (an essential) was gunky and the handle was broken so I threw it out and now lie awake worrying that I’ll never find another one like it. Waffle iron, check. Milkshake maker. Muffin tin. Random spices, some from a bridal shower 55 years ago. The garam masala is still unopened. I’ve lived for three weeks without a microwave, a feat I thought impossible but it can be done. Still, microwaves speak to my heart and I’ll get one as soon as I find somebody who won’t have to have knee replacement surgery after carrying it up the stairs.  (Kondo never talks about measuring the heartwarmth of objects in terms of getting them up stairs, but it’s a factor.) And the dishes. I picked the pattern (Metlox Poppy Trail) for “everyday” china when I was 16 and my mother insisted that I start a “hope chest.” Plates and matching accessories later poured in. I’ve hauled this stuff from St. Louis to Houston to San Diego to Albany NY and back to San Diego for decades, rarely using them.  But I still like the cutesy pattern and so they’re here even though I can’t say they “spark joy.” They’re just a fixture I keep for no discernable reason. Madness.

Clothes

After two trips and four trash bags of clothes to Goodwill and despite living in Southern California, why do I still have seven winter coats, two of which guarantee survival down to 20 below? Yes, I go to Boston in the winter, but I can only take one coat. And the turtlenecks! So 70’s, right? And with global warming it never gets cold enough to wear them here anymore. But I have one in nearly every color and have to keep them against the unlikely event that I ever move to Massachusetts. And do shoes speak to the heart or spark joy?  Mine don’t but, you know, you have to have tennies and sandals and “good” shoes in black, brown and tan, and they add up. Plus red. I have to have at least one pair of cool red shoes in honor of Goody Hallett.

Office

Gack!  Tax returns back to 2003 (How long are you supposed to keep them?) except for 2020, which I have to have to qualify for a WiFi deal. If my tax guy doesn’t have a copy, I’m doomed. There is no earthly reason for me to have pads of graph paper, Avery labels and multiple 3-hole paper punches, but I do. They do not spark joy but I can’t just throw them out, can I? And what about the mounds of interesting postcards, notepaper and envelopes I haven’t used in fifteen years because nobody does that anymore? And worst of all, the cords. At least twenty pounds of cords from old computers, CD players and who know what else, carefully kept because they might be useful someday. I’ll dump them and immediately need the one that has something to do with a TV I don’t even have yet, without which there can be no connection to my old computer and this cord, alone among all known cords, hasn’t been manufactured since 2010 and will be impossible to find.

Sentimental Stuff

Oh boy, a mined field! Kondo says, “Am I honoring the past by holding onto this object or am I avoiding the present?” A conundrum. I’d love to avoid the present; it’s hard, but avoidance is not an option. And there’s absolutely nothing to “honor” in the ruin behind me, so no, I keep almost no sentimental tchotchke from the last two decades. Only a battered business card with discontinued phone numbers. That stays in my wallet forever, a single concession to sentiment.

And so it’s done, a move unimaginable only months ago, trailing debris that even Marie Kondo couldn’t organize. But even a new place, freshly painted and updated, as anonymous as a hotel room, holds something of its past. The chipper site manager of this 230-unit complex dutifully informed me, as is required by law, that the apartment was available because the previous tenant had died.  In the apartment. If I could deal with that, the management would reward my tolerance by knocking $50 off the astronomical rent. Death doesn’t bother me and the $50 seemed silly, but fine.  Except who died? What was the story? “A nice old man,” the site manager said.  “Cancer.” Insufficient info.  But then a long-unpaid WiFi bill turned up in my mailbox, addressed to “Kahnkahm Sudthivongse.” Of course I immediately Googled the surname and learned that in all the world that name exists in only two place – Alaska and California. Only 14 people in the U.S. have that name and they all live in Southern California. But who are they? “Kahnkahm” sounds sort of Mongol and the others have first names like “Khouvny,” “Phonthith,” and “Somsy,” the last a surname that also only turns up in Alaska and California, but no information exists about any of the names. The man who lived and died here is a mystery.

So I touch the walls, waiting to sense some Mongol music or an image of an ancient journey transposed upon the 21st century. Marie Kondo doesn’t talk about how to discard ghosts, but then who would want to?

Photo by Jeet Dhanoa on Unsplash