After all this Marie Kondo talk of decluttering and pinterest picture-perfect home decor, I was relieved to run into Dominique Browning’s celebration of clutter in last week’s New York Times.

As Ms. Browning says, “It is time to liberate ourselves from the propaganda of divestment.” She goes on to defend her lifetime’s worth of art, book, and pottery collections, some valuable antiques, others not.

She asks, “Why on earth would we get rid of our wonderful things?”

Hear, hear.

I think what gets lost in the discussion on clutter and how to reduce it is the distinction between true clutter and our possessions. I’d like to think clutter is the stuff gumming up surfaces of our households, with no real value to us and adding to a visual chaos. Stuff that you would not care if it was here or not here. The stuff we actually like, though? The stuff we actually want around? Maybe go ahead and keep that and DON’T YOU FEEL GUILTY ABOUT IT.

We all know those pinterest photos are staged to within an inch of their lives, right?

In our home, I’ve insisted on keeping all of our books, CDs, and photos. I remember growing up, fantasizing about having access to a massive library (ala that scene in “Beauty and the Beast” — oh my God, it’s on YouTube!!! Ugh, that LADDER. I would have killed for a library with a ladder). I’d spend hours looking through an atlas, dreaming about all the places I’d go. Or work my way through my brother’s bookshelf, whatever happened to be on it.

We have the library now, and if we also have a teenage bookworm in the family, it’d be a wonderful tool for her to have access to.

Likewise, if we end up having a musicophile, what better gift than Dave’s thousands of CD’s? (Thousands: not an exaggeration. He counted them once.) Doesn’t every musician say they grew up stealing their parents’ LPs? If she’s an audiophile instead, lord knows we have the equipment to back that up as well.

Do you have clutter that you actually like? That you want to keep around for yourself or future kids?