When I was a child, my mother would take me to see a friend of hers who lived in an old house riddled with cubby holes and secret spaces. Each time, as we left, the friend would reach into a drawer and press something into my hand as a parting gift: a piece of blue glass, a single pine cone. Once, a white plaster elephant. These, I was meant to understand, were great treasures.
Today that friend might be regarded as a good candidate to appear on the kind of TV show in which a “decluttering professional” arrives, Mary Poppins-style, on the doorstep of a chaotic family home and restores peace and order with the aid of some wicker baskets and a label printer.
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