Old Things

We have a hard and fast rule in our house:  no clutter.  If items are to be retained, they are to be used.  We have a low tolerance for knick-knacks (a.k.a. "dust catchers") and we almost constantly have a brown paper grocery bag behind our bedroom door to catch donations to Goodwill.  Of course that tactic is not without side effects, as a Goodwill "drop off" almost always results in a Goodwill "pop-in," but generally we are big proponents of weeding out the unnecessary things of life.

Now, I fully admit, I was not born having an abhorrence to clutter.  In fact, pretty much the opposite.  I have learned everything I know about the art of decluttering from my husband, whom (as I mentioned earlier), would rather be living off the grid in a yurt.  While that is probably unlikely, at least on a full-time basis, the ideal of that lifestyle does tend to lead one to be a minimalist.  

Learning to declutter has not been easy.  At times, I have rather painfully learned to let things go.  I have made difficult decisions.  But I have also learned that if I am going to keep something, I'd better find a way to use it.  Thus, we play with our post-war Lionel trains and use antique quilts on our bed and sometimes our nice linens get wine stains on them that have to be carefully removed.

So when my cousin sent a cutwork tablecloth to me that had been shut in her cedar chest for years, I knew I had to find a use for it.  As we still have a preschooler at the dinner table, I'm not quite ready to use it for its intended purpose, but I did find a way to repurpose it instead.  It now adorns the outside of my cedar chest, and lightens up our tiny bedroom in new ways.  

We aren't quite sure who made the tablecloth.  It may have been my cousin's grandmother-in-law, from whom she received it.  Or it may have been someone else.  At any rate, decades later, it is being used again!