I’m uncluttering. My house, my life, my schedule. At one point I read that you should hold a six-month purge. It was not until I had been slowly purging for several years that I realized the author meant, ‘purge unnecessaries every six months’.

I’m a child of Depression era parents. They grew up keeping everything. My mother read Side-tracked Home Executives when I was about 12; I read it, too. It was an engrossing tale of two sisters struggling to organize their lives, followed by detailed instructions on how they did it. They succeeded, according to them. I thought the principles made sense, academically.

My mother applied them. Over several years she completely rearranged her home. She changed the way she cleaned. She also read many other organization books: The Clean Team, Do I Dust or Vacuum First, and my favorite, Clutter’s Last Stand.

I read them; they were fascinating. There’s a science to cleaning? Cool. Make Your House Do the Housework was especially enlightening. There are materials that are easy to clean? Wow.

My mother remembered being in the house when her mother and grandmother slit the ceiling cloth in her grandmother’s log cabin. They carefully pushed all the dirt accumulated in the cloth to one end, where it fell out onto the floor. They swept it up with brooms. The roof was logs covered with dirt. Grass grew on it after rain; only after rain, because they lived in irrigated desert: northern Wyoming.

By the 1980s, of course, shingle roofs and clapboard siding were common, along with concrete foundations. Newer houses had aluminum siding. My parents had plaster and lath walls in their 1910s era home. My mother griped about the cold in her kitchen with no insulation.

So in November my father took a crowbar to the walls. He and my youngest brother moved the corner china cabinet out and took the interior walls down. I got to see the thin laths with a thick sturdy layer of plaster. They cautioned me not to play with the fluffy bright yellow fiberglass insulation. It was beautiful to look at, with plain brown paper backing. I didn’t immediately understand how putting this blanket inside the walls would help, especially since it was apparently made of glass… That’s glass??

My mother laughed about it afterwards: “I complained about the cold, so in NOVEMBER he tears the walls out. But it’s insulated and so much better now.” I could hear her laughing pride in her diligent husband. He lived by the principle that Now is the best time. My brother learned from him all about how to put up drywall, spackle, sand, and paint it.

It never occurred to me to try to help, and no one suggested it. I watched, and then went back to my books.