Clutter Battle!

Blog 151:

        Have you lately been around a place seemingly familiar ...glanced through the layout of things, then looked away as quickly as you can or closed your eyes because you do not like what you see?  Such a place might have potential for fine-looking and breathable, peaceful  things, but because items have collected in places here and there, without respect for order, balance or organization, it had become chaotic?  Time and again, I have, at my mother's living space!

        Two weeks after I got re-acclimated into the swing and things around my house that Mother temporarily occupies, I began to again be uneasy.  Uneasy ... not for anything seriously important, but because I just have never approved of how Mother had kept,or not kept things.  For some reason,  she time and again collected items that to me were unimportant or doesn't serve a legitimate purpose.  She repeatedly reasoned that this or that item bundled and stashed, would either go to a charitable cause or a relative unfortunately not able to get such material things as clothing, footwear, appliance (working/notworking), toys her grandchildren have outgrown, kitchen or dining ware, etcetera!

        As many times as we'ved talked over her practices, nothing had sunk in, it seemed.  I could not think of an explanation other than perhaps, Mother had continued to live in a much older time .. that of an economic depression and war-time era she lived through in the past.  An era may be that was far removed from easy access to replacing things when they got broken or chipped, rather than recycling them over and over until they actually fll apart.   Around the house, there were binsand boxes filled with thingsthat just stay in them --- for years,  baskets of brown paper and shopping bags, canisters bursting in the seams of cabinets that could be properly used to organize items of essential use ... small and big items that crowd the entire house.  Mother also had kept things that she hoped she still could make out of  bits and pieces of fabric, along with sewing items ... zippers, buttons, trimmings ... saved from almost tattered clothes that  for avery long time, she would not part with just because , in her words, 'they have use still.'

        Every time I come home, I'd restrain myself from saying anything, or doing something to clear up 'the clutter', but I just now realized how pointless my exercise had been.  Mother would not change her practices.  She would not consider re-arranging anything because the clutter had become part of her internal, psychological system as she liked them.  There definitely is something that the clutter, from my viewpoint, is serving, which I would never understand.  They have become her treasures ... her comfort ... her assurance that she would not, by any circumstance live without!