Last year when I was packing up my apartment in Johannesburg, I watched a few too many episodes of the reality show Hoarders, where people with obvious, serious problems are hectored into shape over an episode’s arc of denial, shame, anger, acceptance and redemption. Around this narrative I watched half-full bottles of condiments and bubble bath go down my sinks with a satisfying glug, I gave away bags of clothes I was still wearing to my friend’s church, I packed up a suitcase that went to Ghana, three more that came to Nova Scotia. I left a guitar in a friend’s spare bedroom and told her she could sell it or smash it, (sorry, A-P).
Pieces of me are strung out across three countries, on the wall of my sister and brother-in-law’s house, on my mother’s bookshelf, in half a dozen plastic storage totes and boxes above the garage. I’ve waged an assault on stuff in my mobile life, paring it down so that it could all fit with ease into a pickup’s flatbed.
A cluttered place is a cluttered mind but what happens when that clutter is actually artifact, clues of a life lived? What’s worth hanging on to, what questions can be answered in back closets, high shelves? I need to find this balance because I know I’ve thrown out things that still had utility, for sentiment or personal history. In a deep pile of my grandparents’ papers, cards and letters, my sister and I flipped through a couple of Girl Guide calendars from the 1980s and 90s. Looking at the smiling girls on those calendars I was a girl again myself, remembering how we’d hawk the calendars for fundraising, remembering how the girls looked like they were having so much more fun than I did on the cold nights in the basement of the United Church.
Then I got to the calendar for 1988, with a smiling little Brownie and Guide looking down at a globe as their leader points to Chad in west-central Africa. It’s Twinning, or in French, Jumelage, our bilingual organization tells us on the cover.
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“Is Nova Scotia twinned with Ghana?” I asked my sister. She flipped the calendar over to show the map that connected each province to its country. “Yep, it is,” she said.
And there it was, deep in the collected decades of stuff, the type of thing I would have thrown out on Jan. 1, 1989, had I been the adult then I am today. There was my answer to why Ghana had always been familiar to me. I would have been a tiny Brownie in that cold church basement, writing letters to a girl in Ghana, learning about whatever project we were doing there (the calendar talks vaguely about a co-op set up for women outside Accra), having my first-world stereotypes developed with a picture of happy-poor Africans under a tree for the November page.
I’ll always throw out too much, too many things that could be used or preserved or savoured again. My instinct is to declutter. But there’s a wonderful value in getting a last shot at these memories, at answering the smallest of questions before we finally wrap it all up and send it out to the curb.