Elderly Decor

When I imagine an elderly person’s house, it is always cluttered. I see how that happens.

Your Forties: An end table is no longer functional because you have rearranged the furniture. Still, you keep it in the living room because it never hurts to have an extra table. Besides, it matches.

Your Fifties: You grow tired of going to the kitchen junk drawer to get the Chapstick. You take a nice wooden box and put a stick of Chapstick in it and put it on that table.

Your Sixties: You pull the table next to your chair so the Chapstick is always available. You stop putting the Chapstick in the box because the box is full of your nail clippers and magnifiers and you need the Chapstick every damn hour in the winter.

Your Seventies: Every surface in your house is covered with so much stuff that you get a Dave and Buster’s level of sensory overload just sitting in your living room.

Your Eighties: You stop dusting because you can not see any part of the surface of the original end table.

I am in my fifties, and Gary is in his sixties. (There is Chapstick and Werther’s candy in the box.)

I am fighting the good fight against clutter. There are now four things on the mantel instead of seven. Just this week a bench was banished to the basement purgatory (basegatory? purgament?), and it is soon to be followed by the movie projection screen if Gary can’t figure out a way to hook up the old technology to the new iPads.

I can’t make myself go as far as friend Anne, who puts her heavy KitchenAid mixer away in a closet when she isn’t using it. She is younger than I am, though.