This post might be a bit of a downer. If you aren’t in the headspace to handle that just keep on scrolling and move on.
So, a couple of years ago we lost my Mom. Skimming over a lot of it we have been trying to deal with all the stuff that she collected over the course of her life. This includes the stuff that Dad had collected over the course of his life and that mom was just unable to deal with when he passed.
My family are collectors. When we get into a hobby we dive straight into the deep fucking end of things. In my Dad’s case that came down to piles of Coca-Cola collectables and stamps. Now you are probably thinking that Stamps don’t sound like a huge issue. However Dad collected them for a long time, and he had a lot of them. Something like 20 index card boxes and 14 banker boxes full of the things. Now stamps aren’t that big, so you can get a lot of them into a bankers box.
So. Yea. There are a lot of stamps here.
Recently however the focus has been on dealing with a very large rolltop desk.
Now, rolltops were a thing back in the day, you know when people would use a desk for writing and not just holding your computer off the ground.
My understanding about the desk is that it’s something that my Grandmother picked up “back in the day” and that it was passed down through her kids until the thing wound up in my mothers hands, where she used it for many years. Now that she’s gone however me and my brother are faced with what to do with it.
While I would love to have kept it at my house I just don’t have the room for another desk in my house unless I’m swapping out one of the existing ones, and those are all piled with existing stuff that doesn’t really go on a rolltop desk. My main computer desk has too many computers and monitors on it, and the workbench that is on the other side of the room that holds my 3d printer and tools is deeper than the working space on the rolltop.
My brother is kind of in the same place. No space, doesn’t work for what he’s doing.
So, we reached out to the family, however most of the remaining aunts and uncles are downsizing and don’t have the room and none of my cousins either have space, or interest in the desk.
So in the end we put the thing up on a local marketplace and sold it to someone who really wanted the thing.
Do I feel bad about selling the desk?
Yes, and No.
The desk itself didn’t really mean anything special to me. And frankly that’s the case for 95% of what was sitting in my parent’s home when they left us to deal with their belongings. There were a couple of things that me and my brother found sentimental, a camera, a candy dish, small things like that, however nothing large was really something either of us had interest in.
China? Stamps? Other collectables?
Meh.
They are just a pain in the ass to get rid of at this point. At least at the scale that they are sitting around here at now.
And looking at it I’m sure that I’m going to leave similar pains in the ass for my kids. I think I’ve mentioned it in the past but I collect pens, specifically fountain pens. While I enjoy them I don’t know that my kids are really going to care about them or the other things that I’ve been collecting over the years. I’ve made it clear to them that I don’t care what they do with the stuff once I’m gone so that they don’t have a huge struggle about what to do with all the stuff.
I don’t see myself becoming a minimalist, but I think that I can definitely slow down the accumulation of stuff if nothing more than as a favor to my kids in the far flung future.