The bittersweetness of last summer things

Coming home this evening, I stopped at a local flower grower and bought 10 sunflowers.

They are the last ones of the summer.  For two days now, I passed them, waiting in white gallon buckets under a roadside tent, on my way to and from work. I hesitated buying them, because it would be a tacit acknowledgement that the summer has moved on, and only its vestiges remain.  

Even so, I love fall. Every weekday, I've been driving the back roads to work and enjoying the gradual reddening of the trees, corn husks standing sentinel in the fields, and farm trucks loaded with beach ball-sized pumpkins. But here I am, reveling in these huge, solar blooms.


And as beautiful as they are, you're probably wondering what do sunflowers have to do with uncluttering and unhouseholding, right? I have to say that they remind of me of the transience of material things...just like the final flowers in October. 

The stuff that owns us is transient. We use it for a while and we wear it out or we give it away or sell it--or when all else fails, we dispose of it properly, I hope.

It doesn't really work in the big scheme of things to keep all of it, all the time. This is a big revelation for me. It isn't because I'm especially materialistic. I just didn't know how to let go of some stuff. But it's getting a little easier every day.  

I gave away a set of 25-year-old porch furniture recently.  I finally figured out that the only reason I kept it was because it used to live on the sunporch at my parents' house. When I would visit, I liked to fall asleep on the chaise lounge from the old set. But I don't do that on my own porch. Maybe I must have been trying to hold on to the memories through these white and yellow plastic chairs.

But since the summer's gone, so must go the old porch furniture. The transience of stuff finally makes sense to me, and clearing the clutter--and the fog of ambivalence around it--is becoming less difficult.


Thanks to Karen Kingston's Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui for prompting my thoughts for this blog.