Give It Away, Give It Away, Give It Away Now

So I have been growing increasingly restive with the sheer amount of stuff cluttering up our house. We own probably the average amount of stuff for a four person middle class American family and, I don't know, maybe it's not the stuff itself, it's just where you put it. But our belongings are oppressing me. Everywhere I look there is something that needs to be picked up or put away or cleaned or otherwise dealt with, and I am just plain tired of dealing with all of it.

I'd been feeling this way for awhile but, other than muttering under my breath whilst stuff-wrangling, had not actually done anything about it. And then last week it was time to go camping.

The list of things we could not find is long and wide. Our tent, for example, though that might actually be my brother's fault. Also we own not one but two mountain pie makers, but can I find either of them? Nope. On the day we were leaving for our week in the woods I raced around like a crazy person from house to garage to storage room unable to find anything I wanted. And the reason I couldn't find the damned pie makers (or the tent, or the baby's swim float, or any of a half dozen other crucial items) was that there was all this other stuff, everywhere. Objects of every use and description, totally disorganized, piled in crazy heaps, shoved into every corner. STUFF. It's to the point where you literally cannot walk into our garage; the wall of stuff begins just inside the door. In order to actually enter the garage you must first dismantle a path into the interior. It's kind of stunning, really: We have achieved complete and uttter craplock.

My solution? Give it away. If it's all sitting in untouched piles in our garage, then clearly we don't use it. So why do we even have it? Time to go. Bye bye. Sayonara, stuff. Starting today I am giving away an object a day for the next 30 days.