Do what I did: look around your room and your house and stop a moment to remember where things came from. There's probably a lot of stories lurking in your living room unless you're very rich and it's just a case of hunt and buy. We are so accustomed to the things we own that we forget how we came by them. We bought them, yes, but we also inherited them, borrowed (and kept) them, accumulated them somehow, by accident as often as by intent. What's the oldest thing in the room? The newest? That's what I mean by the private history of furniture. Everyone has a story to tell; every stick has a history. And these things do not disappear. Sometimes they own you. Some times the people who gave you stuff own you, too. I got launched on a series of bad choices in my first married digs because my parents' best friends gave me a hideous lamp in my unfavourite colours and then my father generously paid for huge, lined curtains on a track across the windows in those colours and I was stuck with them. It was years before I got rid of it all. I think people are smarter than I was/am and don't make mistakes like that. And there are now ways to rectify them, short of landfill. A Basement Boutique is one way. We have one. We - the other people who live in this apartment building - have a few shelves in the corner of the underground parking garage where we bring our discards, mistakes, unwanted or no longer useful items for others to salvage. It's recycling at its most refined and effective and it's often serendipitous. And it's another chapter in the history of my/our possessions. Hey, it beats hoarding.

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.