I went up into the attic the other day, and if attics could talk this one would tell you that as I climbed the stairs, I had this look on my face that told all the stuff up there that I meant business.

I was armed with boxes and tape and heavy duty garbage bags and an idea that I was going to be the great equalizer between the past and the present.

When you go and clean your attic, you do not come down the stairs the same person that strode up them, and that’s because all that stuff up there is the physical representation of your life -of the years that have passed, of your million memories.

It makes you melancholy to look at all those things – especially if your plan is to throw most of it away.

People say that memories live in your heart and while that’s true, it is also true that they live in your attic. Anytime you wish to revisit your past, just take a stroll up the stairs, try on your bell bottom pants, look through your daughter’s baby book; look for your face in your high school year book.

And then face this simple truth: It’s hard to throw that stuff away.

It’s hard to throw that stuff away because it is the tangible proof that you lived, that you once walked down a high school hallway; that you gave birth; that you wrote poetry once; that you actually owned a pair of moon boots.

I am trying very hard to be a responsible steward – to organize things so that one day my children won’t be throwing away receipts from Wegmans and dispensing with the notes I passed in study hall in 8th grade.

But I also want to leave them a trace of who I was – remind them that I was once a child, that I saved their valentines; that I cared about the days I lived.

Our boxes of stuff are proof of life, proof of the value we’ve placed on our time here.

I stayed in my attic for hours each day last week, reading old letters, paging through books – fascinated by the passage of time.

What I’ve decided to do right now is to embrace these changing seasons; to admit that the picture of me climbing a snow bank on Winsor Street with a pair of ear muffs was a very long time ago indeed. I have been alive a long time now–not in the history of time, but in the span of my own century. The now yellowing black and white pictures of me as a child make this clear.

I’m going to make room for new things in my life by dispensing with the old things.

I have been collecting books since I was 16 years old and last week, I gave them all away – a thousand of them at least. It was the hardest thing letting go of the books that I have been lugging around for decades. They told the story of me – what interested me throughout my life, what I wanted to know.

And – poof – just like that they are gone now. I’ve made room in my attic because we all know you can’t invite something new into your life if it’s already full of boxes.

Someone once told me that when I die, I’d be amazed how quickly life would pave over my existence. My stuff would be given away, my bills would be squared up and accounts closed, my house would be sold, my social security number retired.

And while that is true, hopefully a box of me will live on somewhere – probably in one of my children’s attic.

There is a movement that is gaining steam in our world – one that seems sensible and practical but one that I want no part of.

I don’t want to live in a tiny house – the ones that you see on TV. Not just yet anyway. There is no room for my artwork, grandma’s tea cups; the seashells I found on a Florida beach in 1972.

I think the stuff in our lives should be a reflection of who we are and it’s okay to let that stuff define us as long as we’re alive.

But occasionally, go up into your attic and say hello to your eight-track tapes or Captain Marvel comic books and celebrate the stuff that has shared your life with you.

And then … throw a few of those things away.

Because what you’re trying to do is make room for what comes next.