Cleaning House

I should have been a Depression-era kid. You'd think I was if you'd have been here today as I was cleaning out the basement, garage, and walk-in storage area upstairs on my yearly Goodwill run. I clean the basement and and the walk-in once a year, and by clean, I mean sort through all the stuff I pile up in both spots over the course of the year, and decide where it goes: to some more permanent spot in the house, to a friend or family member, to Goodwill, or to the trash. The garage is just pitiful. I haven't given it a good cleaning and sorting for a couple of years. Maybe more. I'm hanging my head in shame here. Every time I do these tasks, I run across those items that I just can't get rid of, but which have no real immediate use. We all have things like that, right? Today, I'm pretty surprised by the things that seem to fall into that category for me, and it's led me to my earlier conclusion. I should have lived through the Great Depression.

I found five mixed balls of yarn. These are balls of yarn in which I've tied together longish pieces of a variety of colors and fibers and rolled them up into a ball. Why? I found at least 20 of those green plastic bud vases that you get when you receive a flower arrangement--ones that hold a single stem and have a pointy bottom so that a florist can shove the flower into dirt or a chunk of oasis. Perhaps I had some intention of creating my own backyard flower arrangement? I found about a dozen plastic film canisters (remember those?), several old make-up brushes cleaned and saved from discarded blush compacts, a stack of used file folders with the labeled tabs whited out, a stack of greeting card envelopes in every size imaginable (without a single card), at least five pairs of old sunglasses with ear stems so stretched out I'd have to have a massive amount of water on the brain to keep them on my head, and a gigantic bag of old cotton socks with holes in them (I think I can call this my rag bag).

The really curious bounty was in the garage, though. Over the many months or years that things have piled up there, I managed to save some interesting things. I found the bowl part of an old bird bath, cracked in half. I saved it that way: I have no memory of what I planned to do with it, but I've been saving it for years. Today, it hit the trash can. I found the aluminum grill/screen protector from a screen door that I replaced twelve years ago. I remember thinking that I could sift compost through it (uh-huh). I saved two broken fireplace screens for the same purpose. Let it be said that while I do make compost, I never sift it, and if I did, I have a nice sifting box that my dad made out of old bits and pieces of things he'd saved about 50 years ago, so I really don't need to haul out the aluminum storm door parts for that job. All this is headed for the trash, and, ultimately, for the metal-grabbing trash pickers who cruise my street every garbage night. I found a nice, neat pile of cardboard boxes, all broken down, and all intended for use in garden (see the blog entry on my teenaged garden for that explanation). They're in the recycling bin now. I found five, two or three foot long pieces of garden hose. Again, why? My favorite find was a plastic grocery bag overflowing with long twist ties--the kind that come in packaging and hold items in place on, say the cardboard box. I am a compulsive twist tie saver. My mom used to save them off the bread loaf packaging: I'm not that bad. But I do save those nice long heavy-duty ones. They're so useful. Potentially. I'm not sure I've ever used more than five of them in the time I've been in the house, but that bag stays. My bits of plastic encased wire will save me in post-apocalypse Ohio. It's possible.

Lest you think I'm a hoarder, let me say that I am not. Really, I'm not. Not the kind that makes for scary reality TV show watching, anyway. I'm the child of two Depression era parents who saved everything that might have a second use, so that's just the way I'm wired. Today, I hauled five bags of stuff to Goodwill, though, and gave an unused porch swing and a well-used area rug to a former student; i also filled three cans for the trash, and one gigantic recycling bin. It felt good. Whenever I do this, though, there's that nagging feeling that I just might need one of this things I've dumped. It's unlikely to be the cracked birdbath or the aluminum storm door grill, though. It's possible that even the trash pickers will pass on those.

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