That electronic nerd who thinks that things are going to disappear is nuts. On the other hand, we should lose a lot of things, I mean a lot. Okay, so forget the electronic mementos we have, connected to us by wire or not (but not hard-wired, that's something else). However you retain and or store these evanescent comforts, they of course will disappear and vanish and be recovered and replaced. But not refurbished, not renovated - that's something you do with houses and the contents thereof. The "things" are the contents of your mind and they will become something irreplaceable if sometimes faulty or fading, that is, memories. (No, no, they can't take that away from me.) But things - concrete, tangible things - they have a history and a shelf life of their own, too much, in fact. Take a look at the television show, "Hoarders". Talk about reality! It's a horror story. It's about nightmares, what happens to people when things creep up on them, get ahead of them and inundate them. Short of going national with your problem, short of getting an expert to sift through your detritus, you can follow a few rules. Like, for every thing you bring into the house, toss two. Like, go back to wartime rules. Oh, I forgot: for you that wouldn't be going back because you weren't alive then. Well, the rules about things during the war (World War Two, darling), were: Use it Up, Make it Do, Do Without, Toss It Out. I think that's right. Maybe Do Without was last. Doing without is something few people are good at these days with the emphasis on instant gratification. Perhaps only writers now are familiar with delayed gratification, but it has been thrust upon them. They don't do it willingly. Well, some years ago now, when I decided to buy and live in my very own writer's retreat, I divested myself of a lot of things and moved north to a (winterized, i.e. not very warm) cottage on the shore of a lake in Muskoka. I gave away or sold enormous amounts of stuff, the accumulation of a lifetime, almost, except books., (Someone told me my cottage smelled like a library.) When the smoke cleared and I looked around at what I still owned (too much), and I pondered over what had survived the Great Clearance, that's when I began to develop a private history of furniture. More anon.

To me, and to a lot of people, September/Labour Day is like the New Year, only more so. It's a beginning, dating back to the first day of school, and throughout the school career, the back-to-the-books feeling. New beginnings, new routine, new resolutions. So I wish you a productive new year, starting now. But I can't dwell on it now because I'm up to number 9 on the list of things predicted to disappear in my/our lifetime. Things. Right, things, But the list I read considers things to be cultural things, not things like spoons or pillows or furniture or gadgets or tschotschkes. My spell-chek tells me I spelled that wrong. I can't stop now because my battery is running low. What an excuse! Very thing-y. The idea of this prediction is that we don't own the things we have, things like books or music or movies or documents (files, papers, reports, news) because they're all delivered to us electronically, hence evanescent; iCloud wasn't named on a whim. I've already mentioned how attached I am to books, how the presence of them in my home comforts me with their vibes. I don't feel that way about the e-books locked in my reader. Recently I've been going through a lot of the books I own, looking for my seed-beds, tiny germs waiting to be fertilized and grow with me into a book of my own, that is, a new one that I will write. I derive a great deal of pleasure in coming across my own snail-trail across books I've read, with the notes and comments in the margins and the post-it notes studding the pages. I OWN those books. They will disappear, of course, eventually, when I lose the power to read and study them. I use the word power advisedly because I am now running on reserve battery power and must sign off, until tomorrow. Happy New Year.