by Laura Falin posted in Life

After my husband and I got married, he was going through some old things of mine and pulled out a dress.
Him: "Why do you have this" It's totally outdated."
Me: "It was my graduation dress. It's special."
Him: "And when did you graduate from college, again""
Me: "Umm...that one's high school. My college graduation dress is over there."

Ignore everything else going on here and focus on my dress on the right. Because it could totally come back and I. Would. Rock. It.
So when I picked up Eve O. Schaub's book Year of No Clutter I decided we could be friends. (Eve, you might recall, is the author of Year of No Sugar.) In her new book, she describes how she saved everything -- sugar packets her husband wrote notes on, every report card she ever got, even a dead mouse in a box (no, really -- her reasoning makes perfect sense). She tossed everything into one large room upstairs (The Hell Room), until the day she decided once and for all that something had to be done. It took her a year, working with her two daughters, to clear the whole thing out.
This isn't an organizing book. Though Schaub does give some guidelines and share how she decided what to keep and how to get rid of everything else, it's more of a personal story. A hilarious, sometimes emotional, personal story about how she got attached to all the things, and how she finally decided to let a lot of them go.
I think decluttering has go...