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room to grow

In the April issue, I shared the news that my parents recently downsized to a smaller home. Although the house they left was not the one I grew up in, it was filled with lots of love. Turns out, it was also filled with a bunch of my old stuff, as we had not properly purged during the first move that happened when I was in college. It took me several weeks to reckon with the boxes of memorabilia that had been tucked away in my former bedroom. As I went through them, I was struck by a wave of nostalgia with each new discovery: a stack of doodles by friends that had been tacked up on my walls; the CDs I played over and over again in high school; a box of diaries where I’d catalogued my feelings about all of it.

I’m thinking about my own recent decluttering marathon not only because of our Spotlight story on organization (page 43), but also because my experience seems to pertain so well to this issue’s theme: Family Homes. This old collection of things was a bit of a mess, but it was also evidence of a well-loved little girl. I had needed space to grow and learn and be myself—and, yes, stash my stuff for decades—and my parents had given me that. And that’s really all we can ask for in a family home, isn’t it?

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Stephanie Maxwell Newton, editor stephanie@athomearkansas.com