Death of the Accord

Cam Marston has a confession today — eighteen months ago, he and his wife made a pact to declutter their house for good. Here's why it didn't survive contact with a U-Haul trailer.

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About eighteen months ago, my wife and I made a deal in a hotel room overlooking the Atlantic. We called it the Fort Lauderdale Accord — not a bucket list of what we wanted before we died, but a list of what we wanted gone. Our aim was to simplify and we agreed on one thing: we had collected too much stuff. So we made a rule. One thing in, two things out. Net loss, every time. We clinked glasses, pinkie truced, and named it like a treaty.

For a while, it worked. Drawers emptied. Goodwill runs multiplied. Countertops and the bottoms of drawers reappeared — visible countertops, with nothing on them, visible drawers with nothing in them. We were smug about it. We could do this.

Then my mother-in-law passed away, and my wife and her siblings spent two weeks in Raleigh emptying her parent’s home. Room by room, drawer by drawer — the work nobody prepares you for. My wife came home in her SUV towing a U-Haul trailer, both packed to the roof. We had to get a storage unit due to so much stuff.

And here's the thing — the Accord didn't fail because we lost discipline. It failed because we'd built a rule for the wrong category of object. One thing in, two things out works fine against impulse buys and gadgets and garage-sale finds, because those things are interchangeable. Lamps are lamps. They have little emotion to them.

However, a grandfather clock that chimes every half hour and puts my wife back in her bedroom where she could hear the chimes throughout the night all during her childhood? That's not an object competing for shelf space. That's not even really an object. It's a delivery system for a memory, and the rule we wrote was never built to take that into account.

That's the part I missed when we pinkie truced our little treaty. We treated "stuff" as one category, when it's really two: things you acquired, and things that acquired meaning long long ago. The first kind has gravitational pull — it accumulates because it's easy, and stays put out of inertia. Not because it matters. The second kind doesn't accumulate at all. It just shows up loaded with emotion and memory, and you'd never get rid of it on a technicality.

So we've set a new plan — two years from now, whatever the kids haven't claimed for their own houses and apartments by then goes. But, truth be told, I give that plan poor odds. My wife and my long-term history is to collect, not cull. However, I've stopped thinking we have a discipline problem. It's a category problem. Maybe this stuff means too much, and its outside a rule pinkie truced and clinked over wine glasses.

When the last box gets unpacked, we're opening a bottle and clinking glasses again. Not to the Accord — but to what it taught us about ourselves. And a U-Haul trailer. And a grandfather clock that still chimes on the half hour, exactly like it did in her parent’s home.

I'm Cam Marston, and I'm just tryin' to keep it real.