Confession of a pare-down addict

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I can’t help it.

Both my parents passed the minimalist gene to me.

The get-rid-of-things alleles from my mother and father took complete control 75 years ago.

The wax Santa in the photo sat on a little pass-through window between my childhood home’s kitchen and family room.

It’s the only thing I wanted from my mother’s modest estate when she died at 96 in 2017.

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This photo and story might help you understand my genetic chronic downsizing.

Meet my parents.

Aren’t they a nice-looking couple?

By the way, I would never have gotten rid of Doc Brown’s DeLorean Time Machine.

It could have been my father’s as he was an inventive engineer.

If only…

In 1960, my parents built a two-room addition to our little house: a first-floor family room and a second-floor bedroom.

Wax Santa commemorated the new family room.

Mom and Dad slept on that hideaway couch for the first decade of their marriage.

That’s where I would watch Captain Kangaroo and, on the rare occasion I stayed home from school, I Love Lucy.

They hauled the couch up the stairs when their new second bedroom was finished. It would serve them for another decade or so. This bedroom doubled as our family’s TV room.

By the early 1970s, my two brothers and I had left the nest. To celebrate, my parents bought a new hideaway.

My father died in 1993, at 71, of sinus cancer.

My mother pulled that old sofa sleeper out every night until early 2015, when my brothers and I had to move her to a memory care unit.

In the house, she had lived in for 60 years.

With the wax Santa appearing every Christmas.

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Do you have time for another photo and story?

You may have wondered what I have from my father.

This is my father’s only material legacy to me. The copyright is 1946. He purchased it in the bookstore at St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa, where he would use the GI Bill to finish his engineering degree.

1946 was also the year he met my mom.

There may be a curiosity gene.

But my father modeled curiosity for his three sons.

That’s what this well-thumbed, yellowing relic means to me.

Nurture more than nature.

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Only Santa and Winston from my mother and father.

Both would understand.

My parents were minimalists. You don’t have to get rid of what you don’t buy.

So, it seems natural to me.

To pare down what little I’ve bought or owned.

I take no moral credit for this.

Mom and Dad made me do it.

Before I started writing this morning, I deleted 40 emails. I’m down to 34, and my daily maximum is 30.

For the last month, I’ve been erasing pictures from my 9000 photo library with the ultimate goal of under 6000.

Why?

It just feels good.

And it could be a time machine back to my parents!

Yesterday, I took five books to the free library down the street. Our community has about ten of these scattered about.

Nectar for the downsizing addict.