ALL THAT GLITTERS … MIGHT BE GOLD!

Two circles of my life have intersected like a Venn Diagram. The life of the retired senior who drives an aging Mini and tends to hold on to things “just in case” has overlapped with the life of the person who writes operations manuals for franchise companies. I don’t feel the need for a haircut when I write for a salon, nor the urge for a hamburger when I write for a restaurant, but the decluttering manuals were a call to action!

As I looked at the boxes that hadn’t been opened in years, including some with our parents and even our grandparents’ belongings, I realized that it wasn’t fair to leave three generations of “stuff” for our children to deal with.  And who knew what treasure might be hiding in those boxes that they wouldn’t recognize as “valuable.” Tracy McCubbin’s book Making Space: Clutter Free became my action plan! It was fun to read, and she didn’t make me feel guilty about keeping boxes labeled “Cyndee’s High School Memorabilia” or “Perk’s Navy Papers.”

THE GREAT PURGE

Perk and I started with the garage where we had golf clubs in cracked vinyl bags (we haven’t played golf in over thirty years), electric hedge trimmers (we live in a condo), empty boxes that we might need just in case we dropped Amazon Prime (highly unlikely). We purged, and we threw away, and we decluttered, and suddenly we had open shelving and empty storage bins! The good news was that we found no creepy-crawlies. The bad news was that we found no treasure.

A few weeks later, we tackled our walk-in closet. When was I going to wear a size Small beach coverup that I bought in Manzanillo thirty-five years ago? How many Hudson Bay blankets does one need in Florida?  Why was there a bin of Christmas stocking stuffers that no one wanted? We found blank checks from accounts closed years ago and a bin of 3.5 floppy discs with unknown data, but nothing of value. Going, going, gone!

We progressed through the linen closet, kitchen cupboards, shelves of books and games until the latest effort – my jewelry boxes filled with items that I no longer wear in this retired, casual, senior lifestyle.

PAY DIRT!

The price of gold has shot through the roof into the condo above us! Gold buyers throughout Florida distribute flyers and set up shop in local hotels to buy cast-off jewelry. Ads to sell gold pop up on social media feeds. Even celebrities hawk “cash in your gold” on local TV.

But how to declutter jewelry boxes? I decided to start with McCubbin’s first question: WHY are you keeping this? And then I added, WHAT are you going to do with it?

Should I keep the jewelry? Should I sell it as scrap?

I separated my jewelry into four groups:

1. Jewelry with sentimental value that is priceless- literally
2. Jewelry that I rarely wear, and might be willing to part with
3. Jewelry that has no sentimental value, and if it’s worth its weight in gold, then it’s on the block!
4. Jewelry that should go to a thrift store for a Halloween costume … or into the trash

I took groups two and three to Amore Jewelers in Bonita Springs. Bill Skidmore spent an hour helping me understand why certain pieces of jewelry had value and why I might NOT want to sell them. What was their history? Would I regret letting them go? What would I do with the gems if I sold the gold settings? By the end of the hour, I had several items to keep, and we had discarded a few costume pieces. Bill had a small pile of 14 karat gold jewelry and a small pile of 22 karat gold jewelry that he weighed separately; and those two small piles of glittering gold jewelry that I cared nothing about … turned out to be worth a surprising amount of money! Treasure indeed!!

A CHARMED LIFE

A gold charm bracelet, the first gift Perk ever gave me, was in group one – priceless. The first charm was a mortarboard celebrating our college graduation, followed by an engagement ring charm, a wedding disk, a trinacria from Sicily, children’s births, an abacus, a cartouche, a kangaroo — golden mementos of a lifetime together. I haven’t worn the bracelet in decades. It snags my clothes, disturbs other concert goers, and dangles too close to candle flames when we’re dining out.

I was keeping the bracelet, but what was I going to do with it? I wanted to share the memories, not let them grow even older in a jewelry box. And I came up with the perfect solution!

Bill removed the charms from the bracelet, restored them to their original glow, and secured the loops so that I could string the charms together on a golden chain of embroidery floss. I looped the garland through the lighted branches of a tabletop birch tree so the memories glimmer like dangling holiday ornaments. And I made a booklet recording each charm and its story for our children and grandchildren to read, should they ever be interested.

Unlike my mother’s Murano glass swan, great-grandmother’s Limoges china, and the wax records of my teenage aunts singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in 1943, our children will not look at the charm bracelet one day and say with exasperation, “What should we do with this!?” They can divvy up the charms of their own memories, put them back on the bracelet, or sell them for glittering scrap gold …

The moral of this story is, if you’re going to look for treasure while you’re decluttering your home, start small. Forget the garage. Forget the walk-in closets. Go straight to the jewelry boxes!