The Give-Away Basket

Holding on, letting go.

I keep a basket by my front door–––a good sized basket with a nice, woven teal lid–––for putting things I plan to give away. I put the items in quickly, before I have a chance to reevaluate, and then shut the lid and walk away. Shirts I no longer wear, an unused coffee mug, candlesticks. Sometimes a book I’m done reading or know I won’t read. Once or twice a month, when it’s full, I toss the contents in a box and drop it off at a donation center and forget about them as best I can. Maybe once in a while I wonder about a shirt I’m not sure if I still have. But, god knows, I still have enough shirts. This is a recent habit, the letting go.

   I want to say it started after my first round of the Kon Mari cleaning method. That I became a minimalist and learned overnight to reduce my footprint, release what did not spark joy. But I think it began with death, my mother’s. When my mother died I was the one left to clear out her house. It was early in the pandemic (though she died of cancer, not the virus), and there was the need to keep physical distance. Plus, thrift stores were overwhelmed, and at home estate sales were not really a thing. And so I had to go through everything she owned, sort it into boxes, and carry it out by the car-full. Once or twice I had a haul-away truck come by for the really large items. Did I mention she had a two story, four-bedroom house? That I am her only living child? The closets were all full. The garage was full. One closet was stacked to the rim with photos, loose and in albums. The kitchen cabinets were packed. She had boxes of old letters. Piles of empty, unsent cards. And add to that that the pictures on the wall and shelves were often of my brother who died thirteen years before. His jackets and business papers were piled in the garage. I had to let go of those. And also some of the things that once belonged to my infant son––onesies, a stuffed rabbit, a bassinet––– also gone. The house was an emotional land mine, and I was never sure what I might dig up on any given day.

It was lonely and solitary work. A couple times, relatives arrived on my off days and took things they wanted to keep. Sometimes my best friend, Susan-Jane came up when I wasn’t there and spent hours sorting through papers. Important documents mingled with detritus. A deed might be stuffed in a bag beside gas receipts from 1989. I was grateful for the way she tossed the unnecessary and sorted the rest in boxes for me to assess when I returned and left me little notes explaining the contents.

If only some force could appear and help us do the same with our lives, to sort what is needed and what we can let go of, label the remaining contents on a scale of importance, suggesting uses we may not have thought of. I suppose there are people who help with this: coaches, therapists and the like. But at the end of the day, no organizational consultant can take the place of our own inner commitment to knowing when it’s time to let go: of a dish, a line of a poem, a sweater, a relationship. Even to let go of that which is already gone. Youth, for example­­––it’s dozens of irreplicable markers and abilities. The way we can choose to accept the inevitable or unfixable. When my nephew was little, he would have a growth spurt and be super skinny, then kind of pause and fill out a little, then start over again. In his reedy stage, I used to chase him around a catch him, then squeeze and say “We gotta love what’s left!” How do we love what’s left? How do we let go of what we don’t need?

Perhaps this is the main skill to master on a given lifetime. To let go of something every day. Sometimes an old magazine, sometimes a relationship in which we no longer feel honored or held. Sometimes a plant we know we can’t revive. Big things, small things. Sometimes I’m aware I need to let go of a disappointment, my idea of how something should have gone. This is probably true every day, as nothing I create lives up to the high ideals I had for it. The poem on the page always pales in comparison to its unmarred Platonic version. Sometimes it’s an old version of myself I am ready to set aside, one with limitations I no longer feel the need to keep.

And although I dreaded and often despised the long-haul of clearing my mother’s house, it has given me this: the sense that it is best to let go daily. Best to keep two baskets, one by the door, and one by the heart. Taught me that both need to be attended to, emptied out. This is my study, my contemplation each day. What needs to go in the Give-Away Basket? Today it’s a vacuum cleaner (once my mother’s), a dog bed we won’t ever use because it’s three times the size of the dog we ended up with, a box of clothes I never wear. Another day of the allotment of days I have left on earth. And that’s just for starters. Some days it’s more, some days it’s less. Today it doesn’t even fit in the basket itself. But I am grateful for the giving away, for the slight uptick I feel when I toss out another unneeded thing. For the way my burden lightens even a little. For the wonder at what I’m making room for in the space that’s left.