About a year ago Lynda and I came to the realization that we had to begin decluttering. Maybe that realization came longer ago than that, but it wasn’t strong enough to begin taking actions toward making it happen.

Then, in May of this year, when we had to move a bunch of stuff to make way for workers to do a certain task, we saw the stuff being moved was the fruit of over-accumulation and un-noticed hanging on. De-cluttering was suddenly real. We couldn’t just talk about it and think that no longer accumulating meant we were de-cluttering. We had to actually get rid of stuff.

So, since then, we’ve actually been getting rid of some stuff. Perhaps not fast enough and not enough, but we are actually getting rid of stuff. We put out an old exercise bike for a special trash pick-up this week. It’s a bike that worked but which we never used as we have a better one. Wednesday I took a load of electronic items to the County solid waste center. I also took the old microwave that died back in April. That felt good.

About two weeks ago I started tackling the stamp collection. Or rather, collections, for I have three here. I’ve written before about how stamp collecting was a big part of our growing up. From the time I was 8, for the next ten years barely a day went by that we didn’t work on stamps. Our albums grew large. Dad built stamp boxes out of old TV cabinets from Uncle Kenny’s shop. Before long these overflowed, as did our large Harris Citation albums.

I continued collecting into adulthood, but not in a very organized way. We bought the new stamps as they came out and “sort of” filed them. We bought used stamps from dealers and put them in albums. We saved all stamps that came into the house. We soaked stamps off paper and put them in shoe boxes. In short, we did everything we had done when I was growing up.

We couldn’t get our kids interested in it. I eventually lost interest when the pull of career and other interests came on. Two periods of overseas living, with the stamps in storage in the USA and us wondering if they would survive their boxed exile, helped to lessen the desire. By the mid-1990s the collection was in boxes, in closets or the garage, unseen and untouched.

Then, when Dad died in 1997 we had all the stamps in his house to deal with. I was the one designated by the will to handle the collections, so we packed them into our van and brought them to Arkansas, to rest beside their cousins in other boxes. Then, in 2001, my brother made a visit here and brought his stamp collection with him, asking me to sell it when I sold the others.

We’ve known since then that the collections would some day be sold, but sitting down to organize everything seemed to be so big a job that I didn’t want to devote the time to it. Every now and then I did some internet searches about selling stamps, but that was it as far as actually working on them. The stamps continued to sit. I decided there was no point in trying to interest the grandchildren it stamp collecting.

Fast forward now to May of this year. Stamps were pulled from different places. I realized the time had come to do something. The first task was to bring them all together. I did this, and found the work massive. But slowly I’ve been doing more on it. Over the last two weeks I:

• Separated the catalogues and how-to books from the 1960s out and put them in a separate pile. I think it’s unlikely any dealer or individual who might buy them (if, indeed, I find there’s any market for stamp collections, which I’m questioning).
• Separated out what are really nothing but recyclable materials, such as sheets of cardboard, old envelopes, plastic bins from old cookie boxes used  for sorting stamps, etc. I have a pile of these that I’ll get rid of before long.
• Putting all the sheets of new stamps together and then into a mint-sheet notebook or a small box. I got that done last week, realized the notebook was bulging and something else was needed. On Wednesday I came up with a better solution and completed that on Thursday.
• Organizing a stock book of  duplicates. I’m not sure why, some years ago, I put this book together. But now it’s over-stuffed and bulging. Yet, it had empty pages. Yesterday I tackled it and found that the bulging was due to a poor distribution of stamps in the book. Yesterday afternoon and evening I put all my time into reworking that book, and found the stamps all fit with only minor bulging—and I still have some empty space in it. I may be able to eliminate that bulging if I spend all my time this evening on it.

So, where does this leave me? I should have all the stamps organized and stored in one place by this time next week, maybe sooner. I’ll discard/place for recycling those things that are no longer needed. I’ll check with one person who I think might want my brother’s collection. Then, I’ll break off to do some other things. I have two books in progress that I’m doing a little on simultaneously, but a little more concentrated effort and I’ll be able to finish and publish them.

It was easy to accumulate over 45 years of adulthood and 43 years of marriage. De-cluttering, which really means de-accumulating, is proving hard. I’m sure I’ll shed a few tears when the stamps leave my possession, not to storage, but for the last time. At that time I’ll tell myself “Better with someone else than put in my coffin with me.”