Simplicity...

In my dreams, my house looks an awful lot like Sweden’s Hotel Sigtuna (via remodelista)

You probably realize by now that I have a rather complex relationship with “stuff.”

As with most complex relationships, this one is pretty deep rooted in my childhood experiences... I’ve watched my parents literally lose entire housefuls of stuff (once when I was nine and our home burned to the ground the very night we moved and again during Katrina), so I know how in the entire scheme of things you can live with very little...how our possessions are not remotely as important as we think.

I also have this fixation on being able to "pack light" -- actually "light" probably isn’t a strong enough word, if you asked Bryan, he might say I’m obsessed (full-blown obsessed, not unlike the white situation.) This again (not surprisingly, hello therapy) comes from my childhood… My father is a musician so growing up we moved where the work was… 17 times before I graduated high school -- New Orleans, Austin, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe… As such, we became experts at packing and unpacking -- settling in immediately (my mother is a consummate nester), which is infinitely easier to do when you don’t have a lot of stuff. To keep things under control, my mother would walk through the house once a month with a big black garbage bag ruthlessly collecting stuff to toss or donate.

Bryan’s parents on the other hand still live in the same house they moved into when he was three. They have a lot of stuff. Needless to say, Bryan and I have much different relationships with our possessions. He’s a hoarder, I would throw away anything…I’m not sentimental at all. I know, weird.

At night when I can’t sleep, my favorite game is to play out my shelter fantasy where Bryan, the girlies and I move to a tiny house in the Pacific Northwest where it’s all loamy, green and misty (or Marfa, which doesn’t really fit with the misty green fantasy but is alluring nonetheless.) Since the house we move into is small, I can only bring the things I absolutely, unequivocally love, so I go through each room in my head picturing what would make the cut, chronicling all of my most special/meaningful/essential belongings into this little fictitious place.

That said, since having the girls, I’ve become a smidge more careful in my obsessive culling of our possessions. I now actually stop and think before selling every item of meaning on Craig’s List… I want the girls to have some mementos from their childhood when they start their own families. Just this morning, I was fantasizing about selling all of our baby gear in the next year or so, and while the crib and the Pottery Barn Dream Rocker is nothing special, I had all but sold the lovely Svan highchair that both girls used and would still be stunning in 25 years. So that stays in the attic.

Progress friends, progress…