Koala Diaries: There’s a bear in there

If there is anything to Feng Shui I am completely stuffed. My Chi is blocked with the debris of life and the sentimentality that makes it almost impossible for me to clear away stuff.

I have no system to handle those special little bits and pieces that mean something. I don’t seem to be able to fondle them one more time, trace the special words, breath in their scent, capture their colour and then discard them.

To be perfectly honest part of it is laziness…there is so much I should give the heave-ho; the sum of my lifelong spontaneous purchases, my small mementos, my objects attached to fond thoughts, is so darn large, that it is easier to shove everything into a new box and jam it all back into the cupboard.

And I do that from time to time – go out and buy new storage systems (my first mistake) so that I can start with just this one room.

Take everything out and sort. And this is where I come undone.

Sure, the cheap earrings bought when the fashion was for the dangly Aztec look are easy to ditch. More often than not there is only one of them left…kept just in case parts of them could be made into some crafty thing I might do one day when there was time and I felt creative…I mean the stones are pretty. 

But with determination these can go, as can old clothes, shoes with worn out soles, 10 year old bank statements…all the obvious stuff. But then come the books…it gets harder. I loved them and one day I might read them again or want to give them to someone else to read…or they are I the ones I have always meant to read.

And then the hardest things the notes and cards from old friends…people, once so much a part of my life and now I never see. The farewell cards from workplaces that remind me that I once worked with people who thought I was “special”.

Why must I keep them? Psychologically speaking I can think of several theories – none of them too flattering.

Finally there is the me-defining stuff. Artwork from high school - trees drawn with Indian ink and a toothpick…a Catholic punishment exercise from a nun who could no longer bear my insolence.

A book of angst-ridden poetry with equally strange drawings, documenting the weird turnings of my mind in the years from 12 to 17.

Followed by evidence of the mind-stretching university years – no more personal poetry just “breakthrough” essays on the poetry of Herbert or theories on Australian women writers, or my take on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.

Then sketches of my baby’s feet, so plump and new, telegrams with jokes about what we named him, my poems and drawings of dolphins swimming in the sea and toy’s picnics for his nursery.  Prints of his hands and the cards he made me for Mother’s Day.

Followed by my birthday cards, from several years and then a birthday card from my now deceased father for my 16th. It is full of his humour and tracing his bold handwriting, I am gone…I click back into retention mode. Hours into the exercise my resolve dissolves.

And then I rediscover Him, the defining symbol of my reluctance to let go of the wholeness of life - my teddy bear.

Good old Schnooklepockle (don’t ask…even I don’t understand how an Australian one-year-old with Italian heritage came up with a name that sounds like a Yiddish endearment…a past life maybe). He is 49 this year and sweet as ever, although I am not sure of his quality of life inside the cupboard. He always makes me smile as I repack all the stuff back into the new storage boxes.

We look each other in the eyes with a strange recognition that this is the way things should be…me repacking all the sentimental stuff including him. What a cluey bear he is.

I probably need to move house. Then I would have to face my mounting clutter with the seriousness it deserves. But from past experience somehow it has always managed to come with me. You do some heavy clutter-cutting and as the moving van trundles down the street you tend to just quickly box things up with every intention of sorting it at the other end. It never happens though. Some boxes get to the new place and find a new space to inhabit without ever being opened. And Schnooklepockle is always in one of them.