the morning sun when it's in your face really shows your age, which is terribly unfair.

I told you last fall that I suddenly realized I was a senior citizen, but I don't think I ever told you how that happened.

There were a bunch of small things leading up to it--a nick on my finger that would have been gone in a few days when I was 30 but now lingers for a couple of weeks. The sudden appearance of a muffin top with no changes to my eating habits. My total ignorance of 90% of the people who appear on the cover of People.

But what really made me wake up to my senior status was listening to younger women talk. In the middle of a pandemic, it wasn't my usual habit of eavesdropping in a coffee shop. I was listening to podcasts.

I somehow got into a circle of smart, interesting, thoughtful podcasts by women who were talking online about their reading, their houses, their kids, their skin-- really, they were just talking about their lives. They all seem to know each other. They appear on each other's podcasts, they @ each other on Instagram, they blurb each other's books.

Some of them are enormously appealing, and I found myself listening avidly, as if they were truly friends of mine. But the things they were talking about were... well, they weren't quite right.

You'll remember my frustration with their obsession about skincare. And then their endless discussion of home organizing techniques and "life hacks" -- everything from how to organize your spices to menu planning to how to work more reading into your day.

It wasn't that I don't care about those things, but I would see the topic of the podcast and think it was something I would learn from, and then I'd listen, and their advice would be so basic that I'd end up thinking, wait, you don't know that? You haven't figured out how to organize your kitchen drawers? 

But you know, if I'd heard this when I was in my late twenties or early thirties, I would have thought it was great. Because back then, I was figuring out the same things. But now, I'm not. Our house is never as organized as it could be, but it's organized the way I like it. I might pick up a tip or two, but for the most part, it is clear that I'm not their target audience.

I need to declutter (as always), but it's on an entirely different level than what they're talking about when they describe taking last year's fashions to Goodwill, or clearing out toys that their kids have outgrown. 

We married in 1984. I'll save you the math and tell you our 37th anniversary is coming up in May. If I had only accumulated one box of stuff per year, that would still be more boxes than would fit in any closet not owned by one of those people on the cover of People. The easy stuff-- the clothes I no longer wear, the books I've lost interest in, the DVDs we'll never watch again-- I know how to declutter those, and I do it regularly.

My problem is the boxes of stuff that are pushed to the top shelf of a closet and I'm not really sure what's in them, and when I open them, there's so much miscellaneous crap that I just close the lid back up again. There's a two foot high stack of flute music. There's Doug's old coin collection (which has not been added to in 40+ years, but probably has some valuable coins in it). There's a set of four silver wine goblets from my grandmother, and a shelf of cranberry glass, some from Doug's grandmother and some from my great grandmother. 

There's an entire double-sized crate full of travel books and maps. Who wants old travel books? How do you get rid of them? And my beloved literature textbooks, which are so horribly out of date that they have no value to anyone but me. I've even thought about burning them, because the thought of sending them in a box of scrap paper to the recycling center just breaks my heart. At least I could imagine it as a ritual funeral pyre or something. 

It's an entirely different level of decluttering than the kind you need when you're 38. Compounded by living in a town where nothing sells at a yard sale if it's priced over a dollar, and the only estate sale/auction company specializes in farm equipment and auto parts. We've used them for some big ticket items-- large pieces of furniture, our old pickup camper-- but would they know what to do with cranberry glass? I haven't even tried to find out. The whole thing exhausts me before I've even started.

This is not the series I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, but I can already tell it's going to be two or three parts. Have a great day, and apologies for posting late. This was supposed to go up yesterday, but even though we're no longer locked down, I'm having trouble remembering the day of the week. (just me?)