A few years ago, when I started this column, I wrote about spring cleaning. Every once in a great while, my wife and I get it in our heads to go through everything we have accumulated throughout the years and downsize. Usually this does not go very well because one or both of us are emotionally attached to some random object that we really cannot remember how we acquired or what we have ever done with it.
As we roll out of this mania that has been the North Carolina “winter,” my wife has decided that now is the time to do it again. We skipped last year, so this year — in theory — we should have double the items we need to purge.
Our front closet is a disaster. It has been since we moved in and we really don’t do anything to correct it. It does seem to hold quite a bit of stuff because we keep filling it and never really take anything out.
Our luggage is in there, but we rarely go anywhere that requires actual luggage. Why leave it for the discount airline to lose when we can lose it ourselves without leaving the house.
I think our Christmas tree is in there as well, but since we have adopted three of Lucifer’s felines, we have not put up a tree in a few years. Once in a while, we’ll take an ornament out of storage and look at it and fondly remember Christmas before cats. Cooper especially does not like the Christmas tree and he is the primary reason we got one of those ceramic ones with the little colored lights. He doesn’t like that one either, but it’s a lot harder to move than a spindly one with a lot of bright things hanging off of it.
We keep the coats and such in a closet in our hallway. To get to it, you have to walk through our living and dining rooms. We keep coats and hats and such in there and little else. We don’t keep shoes in there because walking through the living and dining rooms with wet or muddy shoes doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Our foyer is tiled. Shoes can wait there. A lot of the time, I hang my coat on one of the dining room chairs. I do this because the closet is too far from the front door and we don’t have a treadmill or some other piece of exercise equipment to hang our clothes on.
I don’t know what is behind the door of my daughter’s bedroom. What should go here is a list of things that should be purged from there as well, as that is the direction this column is taken. The truth is, I don’t go in there. This paragraph is merely filler to keep my word count up so you don’t open your paper to read the column and see a couple of sentences about an inch about the bridge column. If you understand the bridge column, please drop me a letter at the paper and explain it to me. This ends the filler and padding and we return you to this week’s column.
The bedroom my wife and I share is in a state of what can best be described as controlled chaos. I don’t have a man cave, so I have a cluttered little corner of the room that consists of a big bookcase with books, assorted trinkets, a dozen or two wristwatches, some old fireworks, some vintage shotgun shell boxes and a stuffed rabbit called “Mister Scary Bunny” because he looks creepy and not at all cute as bunnies should. There is a television in there as well, but it’s been so long since I watched it, I don’t even know if it works. The closet doors are the folding kind, or they were before they broke. When we get around to fixing them, there will be another column about that. My wife and I certainly are not competition for Bob Vila.
I keep finding things I forgot I had. I found a pair of boat shoes my mother-in-law bought for me perhaps 10 years ago. I have worn them for a day or two each time I find them and then I lose them again for another year or so. It’s nice once in a while to find a pair of shoes that aren’t worn out and you get the new shoe feeling without having to spend $90 on a pair of boat shoes.
I’ve never found anything particularly valuable because we’re quite frugal and would certainly not lose anything expensive. I once found an overdue library book. I’d checked the book out of the library in the summer of 1985. I doubt the library is still looking for it. I don’t want to be one of those people who gets on television because they returned a book they checked out 100 years ago and finally are getting around to returning it so they don’t go to Hell in the afterlife. While keeping a library book for three generations is a no-no, I am pretty sure you have to have a more extensive resume to get into Hell.
My wife has planned this purge for this weekend. She told me it would be “quality time.” The last time we did this kind of downsizing, we didn’t speak for three days afterward. If all goes well, that might happen again.
Joe Weaver, a native of Baltimore, is a husband, father, pawnbroker and gun collector. From his home in New Bern, he writes on the lighter side of family life.
