Junk and Pack Rats: the lethal duo
The moral of my week is this: throw out old crap. It will prevent various branches of your family tree from having to sort through it while sweltering a house without air conditioning. My mother and I traveled to my grandmother's house to clean out everything she was unable to part with for up to forty-five years. She's a pack rat, just like me, so this meant a lot of stuff. If all the useless stuff in her closets were assembled together, it would crush a kindergarten class before eating a small town. We spent the day pulling a seemingly infinite number of blouses, pants, polos and assorted fashion dabblings from closets, folding them, and putting them in a bag for Good Will.
There is no despair like spending an hour sorting through clothes and determining if they're salvageable, only to discover that you're only halfway through the first closet of six. I had one victory in this cleaning-house: I proved to my mother that I don't have more clothing than anyone else on the planet. My mother has certain convictions about me, stemming from her judgments as the neat, organized person that she is. One is that I am the sloppiest teenager on earth, despite my insistence that I am not qualified because there's nothing growing in my room. The second is that I sleep longer and later than any other teenager. The third is that I have more t-shirts and clothing than anyone else. The third honor actually goes to my grandmother. She had outfitted my grandfather with enough golf shorts for five people. She herself had more sleeveless polo shirts in one closet than there are hobos in D.C. And every time we came to another closet and gaped at eight identical, blue bathrobes or twenty-seven pairs of plaid golf shorts, I felt a surge of pride. My grandmother, unintentionally, defended my pride as a human being not within into the true realm of sartorial abundance. And for this I am ever thankful.
The highlight of the first day was discovering "The Seventies Closet." My grandmother seemed determined to at least lend her mass assemblage of clothing some sense of order. This attempt began with "The Seventies Closet" and ended with "The Golf Closet." And when I say begin and end, I mean there was nothing in between. I could practically smell the polyester. I fingered my grandfather's leisure suits and polyester shirts and wondered why more people didn't drop dead in the streets from heat stroke during the 70s. Although my mother and I giggled over it and shook our heads in amazement, part of me began to wonder: did grandma think polyester was going to make a comeback? That was the striking thing about all of this: there was no good reason to not have thrown out this stuff. She probably didn't even remember that most of the stuff was there, just packed it away with the vague notion that it might one day be useful, and she would regret not having saved the big-collared, peach-colored polyester blouse.
We also discovered, on every floor, what can only be called doodads. My grandfather was fascinated by technology and tinkering, as it turns out. It was clear that he had, for several decades, engaged in late night dialing. Nothing so sinister as drunk dialing, but far more dangerous to increasing clutter. He would watch infomercials late at night while suffering from insomnia; in this moments of perceived clarity, he would see the genius of whatever gadget they were selling, and call to order one. My grandmother, unsure of what was in the boxes, made mountains of them in the closets. We're talking stacks of retro-equivalent extendable forks and sheet-folders.
So today's mandate is this: if you have six closets full of stuff of which you don't remember the purpose or can't remember the last time you used it, chances are that time will never come again. You know who you are, even if it's just the one closet. It will get worse, not better, if you let things go as they have. Trust me. Save me.
Technorati Tags junk,family,cleaning
There is no despair like spending an hour sorting through clothes and determining if they're salvageable, only to discover that you're only halfway through the first closet of six. I had one victory in this cleaning-house: I proved to my mother that I don't have more clothing than anyone else on the planet. My mother has certain convictions about me, stemming from her judgments as the neat, organized person that she is. One is that I am the sloppiest teenager on earth, despite my insistence that I am not qualified because there's nothing growing in my room. The second is that I sleep longer and later than any other teenager. The third is that I have more t-shirts and clothing than anyone else. The third honor actually goes to my grandmother. She had outfitted my grandfather with enough golf shorts for five people. She herself had more sleeveless polo shirts in one closet than there are hobos in D.C. And every time we came to another closet and gaped at eight identical, blue bathrobes or twenty-seven pairs of plaid golf shorts, I felt a surge of pride. My grandmother, unintentionally, defended my pride as a human being not within into the true realm of sartorial abundance. And for this I am ever thankful.
The highlight of the first day was discovering "The Seventies Closet." My grandmother seemed determined to at least lend her mass assemblage of clothing some sense of order. This attempt began with "The Seventies Closet" and ended with "The Golf Closet." And when I say begin and end, I mean there was nothing in between. I could practically smell the polyester. I fingered my grandfather's leisure suits and polyester shirts and wondered why more people didn't drop dead in the streets from heat stroke during the 70s. Although my mother and I giggled over it and shook our heads in amazement, part of me began to wonder: did grandma think polyester was going to make a comeback? That was the striking thing about all of this: there was no good reason to not have thrown out this stuff. She probably didn't even remember that most of the stuff was there, just packed it away with the vague notion that it might one day be useful, and she would regret not having saved the big-collared, peach-colored polyester blouse.
We also discovered, on every floor, what can only be called doodads. My grandfather was fascinated by technology and tinkering, as it turns out. It was clear that he had, for several decades, engaged in late night dialing. Nothing so sinister as drunk dialing, but far more dangerous to increasing clutter. He would watch infomercials late at night while suffering from insomnia; in this moments of perceived clarity, he would see the genius of whatever gadget they were selling, and call to order one. My grandmother, unsure of what was in the boxes, made mountains of them in the closets. We're talking stacks of retro-equivalent extendable forks and sheet-folders.
So today's mandate is this: if you have six closets full of stuff of which you don't remember the purpose or can't remember the last time you used it, chances are that time will never come again. You know who you are, even if it's just the one closet. It will get worse, not better, if you let things go as they have. Trust me. Save me.
Technorati Tags junk,family,cleaning
posted by Meredith at 3:42 AM
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