Sixty-four. Seventy-eight. Eighty-four.
Those three numbers have been on my mind all fall.
Sixty-four is me. I’m in the middle of my 60s. My calendar is busy, and we’ve lived in our house for more than thirty years.
Seventy-eight is how old my mother was when she and I filled three bags of clutter together. She stood in her clean kitchen and said, “I can breathe in here.”
And eighty-four is how old she was when she climbed up on a kitchen chair. She wanted a box from a closet shelf. By herself. In a house she had lived in for forty years.
She was fine that day. But I still think about that chair.
My mother taught me that decluttering looks different in every decade. What feels easy at 64 can feel hard at 78. What feels hard at 78 can turn risky at 84.
So this is my guide to decluttering in your 60s, 70s and 80s. Part of it comes from my own life. The rest comes from watching my mother, who kept going right into her 80s.
Wherever you are, there’s something you can do this week.