For most of my life, I struggled to keep my collection of stuff from getting out of control; I wasn’t usually successful until we were forced to move three times in four years. But I believe I first developed the urge to declutter many years before then.

When I was a small girl, I spent a lot of time (including most weekends) at my grandmother’s house. She lived in a small bungalow on the south side of Chicago. It only had two bedrooms, so it could get pretty crowded with four adults living there on a daily basis, plus my mother, my siblings and I when we visited on the weekends. But there wasn’t a lot of clutter in the house, though on weekend nights, any spare space held a rollaway bed.

There was also a closed-in porch on the back of the house. It was connected to the house by doors in the kitchen and the back bedroom. It was full of old furniture and odds and ends, including a small turquoise television. I can remember asking my grandma if we could clean up that porch and make it into a nice little spare bedroom that we could sleep in when we visited. I had ideas for what to get rid of and how to decorate the space once it didn’t have so much stuff in it. I thought it would be lovely in the summer, with its view of my grandpa’s lovely shade garden, and its many windows open to catch the breeze.

(Of course, I was too young to understand exactly how uninhabitable an unheated four-season porch would be in January in Chicago!)

Grandma would nod at my ideas, but nothing was ever done, and after a few years, two of the residents passed away, so my grandma moved out to the suburbs, by us. But I still remember that feeling of excitement, of all the possibilities, when I looked out in that porch and thought about what could be done once all that stuff was gone. I believe that is the root of my desire to declutter.