In a two-year-old article, Ann Patchett explains that as a teenager she did not consider cream soup spoons essential when she bought sterling flatware as a 14-year old. I do. I will say that I already gave away all the family silver and have bought only odd pieces which I intend to use daily in the new year—using her sterling was something my grandfather’s third wife, Genevieve, did too. Patchett wonders what to do with her dozen champagne flutes that will never find a dozen people wanting champagne, but we have kept fourteen flutes purchased over the years on anniversaries. Though we have no better idea when or if they might be used, they line a high shelf and give me pleasure every time I take down a plain water glass. Throw them on a beach after I die.

I have otherwise been working hard to pare back. My kitchen has been sorted twice already. I did it once when designing kitchen cabinets to be certain I had the precise storage I needed. I did it again while furnishing the condo with things we already had. I bought a new bed and the sofa I’d wanted since I was a teenager—not the perfect one because it cost twice as much, but one very close to what I loved at Keeg’s in Seattle when I was nineteen. The rest was free, came from home, or was thrifted. I bought new measuring spoons, but cobbled together measuring cups from a broken set. I will move over one more Le Crueset pot. I will have to think how or if I will can jam. I will miss my four rhubarb plants

Jólabókaflóð is the Icelandic tradition of gifting and reading books on December 24. Early this morning I began read P.D. James, a book I missed. I had forgotten how brilliant she was! Reading will not end. Keeping all the books I love most.

It took us two years to find the perfect bookcase for the condo living room, which Gary got for my 71st birthday and I have filled with favorite books. Anyone who knows me will understand that filling a bookcase five feet wide did not make a noticeable dent in books stored at the beach. The set of nearly forty years of Best American Short Stories collections will go on to live with someone else (except for the one year with “White Angel” which Michael Cunningham signed) but Patrick O’Brian’s series troubles me, more than twenty and I have read them all several times. Everything written by Dorothy Sayers and Alice Munro, Le Guin and Morrison. French and Gloss are already here. Some of my favorite science fiction and fantasy wait in a stack. There’s also classics and poetry and architecture. Fiber arts.

Gary figured out where to put four bookcases in the entry, about thirty-two linear feet. But that still leaves a couple hundred linear feet of books to discard. Gary has a dozen Bibles in languages he cannot read. I forgot, just now, that I have more books downstairs too, the plays, cookbooks, and children’s books. And Powells is not paying enough to make selling them worthwhile. We will likely donate to William Temple charity shop just around the corner, where I often find books I want to read.

I might try to weave off the rest of my Koigu and handspun and then ask the woman who gave the loom to me if I might gift it on to another weaver. There really isn’t room here for the loom or my step-grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine. The cotton batiks and Japanese kimono and Liberty lawn fabric… I have been giving away quilts. A richly-colored shawl is laid out, waiting for me to cut it into a large pillow cover—the pillow insert itself has been waiting years. I have been knitting items for people and they seem to mostly end up snagged and moth-eaten—I try not to care. Some precious art has already made the move east. More will follow and the rest… well, there will be much less of it if I keep moving.

Last month during National Novel Writing Month I did not write a new novel. Instead, I gathered, updated, and revised the short stories I began writing in 1990, enough for two or three collections. Sorting them and reordering them is a goal for 2024. It is another sort of housekeeping.

I remind myself: I am not my possessions or my makings. I am the people I love, the places and experiences I cherish, a world I know has troubles, my imagination and a future I will not see.

I have not read the book about Swedish Death Cleansing, which empties the home, sells and gifts and makes for less work for the next generation. Some things have recently moved east and will stay until we die but much of what we possess will leave the building before we do. Having cleared homes for loved ones before and after they died, Gary and I do not wish that task on anyone we care about.

It is the purpose of cleansing is to reveal clearly what matters. It is not stuff. It never was.

May you be blessed in 2024!

Thank you for reading this far.

I first wrote about Patchett’s article in March 2021 in my post “Bad at Names.” I am back to running, two miles yesterday1