I helped my mother clear the wrong closet.
She was 84, and I drove over one Saturday to do something useful. I picked her linen closet, because it was easy and the towels were a mess.
By lunchtime, every towel was folded and every sheet had a place. We stood back and admired it. (She made me a sandwich for my trouble.)
A few days later, she told me she had climbed up on a kitchen chair. She wanted a box from a closet shelf. She was alone in the house, and she was fine.
I wasn’t fine when I heard it. I had spent a whole day on towels, and towels never hurt anybody.
So I’ve thought a lot about what really comes first. When you’re over 70, you don’t have endless energy to spend. You want to spend it on the things that matter most.
If you only ever declutter five things, I think it should be these. They won’t take a year, and they won’t empty your house. They’ll make it safer and easier, and your family will thank you someday.
Why Only Five Things?
A whole house is too much to think about. When a job feels too big, most of us don’t start at all.
You have plenty of company there.
Researchers studied Americans over 50, and they found something we all know. As people get older, they get less likely to clean out or give things away. The researchers think the job may get harder, both on the body and on the feelings.
So let’s make the job smaller. I picked these five by asking two plain questions.
Could this hurt me? And would my family be stuck with it if something happened to me?
Most clutter is only clutter. A drawer of old pens won’t hurt you, and neither will a full linen closet. These five things are different.