Spring Cleaning

“Come spring
You can find me rolling in fields
That are exploding in
Holy battles

Of scents, of sounds—everything is
A brilliant colored nova on a stem.”
- Hafiz

Spring cleaning is at least spring something, right? Now I don’t want to say anything bad about hoarders, but… Oops, just did. So I might as well.

It’s not like I’ve been denial about the hoarders I live with. But this seriously surpassed my worst-case scenarios by several orders of magnitude. Ok, there is no reason for a reasonable person to keep empty househould appliance boxes. But empty blisterpaks trump empty blender boxes, my friend. Thankfully, I have a friend with a pickup truck and some strong helpers. She even brought me boxes!

A lifetime of greeting cards filling two big filing boxes. Three generations of photographs filling approx 6 big filing cartons, but spread out into rubber-banded bundles stuffed absolutely everywhere. And a carton of tin film canisters for movie film, plus cameras, splicing supplies and snippets of film. Another carton of obsolete cameras. Some of the kitchen household products like corn starch are suitable to grace an “Antique” (sic) store kitchen filled with obsolete kitchen crap. Several decorative oil lamps in addition to an appalling number of even more appalling ceramic figurines about which the less said the better. (I've said too much).

Tech Support Guy: Some of the cameras are worth a lot.
Weeping Sore: Not to me. The 78 rpm records? The LPs?
TSG: (Crickets)

There was a DAV Auxiliary rulebook from 1934. But the logic of keeping this must have been the update from 1959. Drawer after drawer of junk drawers. Anybody a Firesign Theater fan? Remember the game show where the contestant, handed her prize, complained loudly "Why this is a bag of shit?" The announcer said, "But it's GOOD shit" which the shit in these drawers is not.

New rule: no household may have any more than one single junk drawer, preferably in the kitchen. Corollary: no saving broken crayons, unused yellowing address books, calendars for 1983, broken screw drivers. And for god’s sake – no empty packages for household products that were then stored separately and never used. That’s not three rules by the way, it’s a compound Junk Drawer Rule worthy of this situation.

To date Tech Support Guy has mailed 8 big cartons of primo crap to family members, like a small sample of the lifetime’s worth of mothers day cards and including the photos I’d put into albums years ago until I realized the Stygian nature of this effort. There are five large cartons on the closet shelf of loose photographs in no particular order for TSG to review. Fat chance: medical science has conclusively proven hoarding is an inheritable disorder. I've left several notes among my cartons of my own crap apologizing to my descendants.

But it's not all old stuff. Some stuff is from my lifetime. To date I’ve emptied over a dozen large garbage cans of ordinary crap – dragging the laden cans down the hill and the empty ones back up. We have 5 garbage cans and only three lids, but that’s another story). And it’s been raining. And you don’t want to get on of those red tags stuck to an overloaded can full of water soaked greeting cards so all your neighbors can see you don’t have an experienced gardener to take care of these chores. (Then there’s the recycle bin full of empty wine bottles: yet another story.)

The frickin’ ray of sunshine to brighten my life is having an up-to-date reference if I step on a tetnus-infected needle amid the clutter. Yeah. 1933. That, and knowing that ALL of the drawers are now empty. The boxes are almost all packed up. The pickup comes tomorrow for the rest of the boxes and much of the furniture. And this just in: my marmalade not only gelled, it kicks ass!

So, in case I was in denial about the hoarders before, I have been rolling around in a dusty closet amid overstuffed boxes about to explode, and I have seen the light from brilliant colored novas in packing boxes. Close enough, Hafiz?

One Man’s Treasure...

"There are three things that last: faith, hope and junk, and the greatest of these is junk." - Bible, I Corinthians 13:13 (slightly paraphrased)

Unlike the people I live with, I’m not burdened by the pack-rat gene. Accordingly, when they give me unopened 12 year old bottles of vitamins, crochet needles and yarn that’s older than I am (I don’t crochet) or that moldering stack of National Geographic magazines from the Fabulous Fifties, I can manage to throw the stuff away without a qualm.

We share a dirty little secret. They give their junk to me because they cannot bear to toss it out themselves, whereas I’m an unsentimental fool. Unlike them, I can throw away every single generic birthday card they’ve ever sent me (cold-hearted bitch that I am) as soon as they leave the room they entered to deliver said cards. I’m pretty sure they know I take out their metaphorical trash, but at least they’re spared from discarding the untold treasures buried beneath Grandma’s old Mothers Day Cards inside the cardboard grocery carton of Velveeta Cheese, with smashed corners repaired by curling duct tape. One box has a scrawl in spare red crayon: Household. I assume that if I say “Hhmmmm (pause) Household” in a soft, ponderous voice, while slowly scratching an imaginary goatee, and letting my voice trail off into a whisper, that the contents of this mysterious box will magically be revealed.

If cleanliness is next to godliness, then pack rats are the devil incarnate. There’s Satan, crouching deep inside their souls, amid unlabeled packing boxes, stacked and teetering, plastic bags with old bedspreads, and old shoeboxes of candles from celebrations past, melted into a single ur-candle of indeterminate shape and color, but with some old newsprint transferred to one surface. My theory about the mutant candle is that individual candles tend to meld together in some process of devolution that takes place only during dark nights of the closet’s soul: resistance is futile. Either that, or the metal roof of the shed conducts too much summer heat to expect candles to survive intact. But I’m no scientist.

Way back in Holy Christ Elementary School, I learned that there are three things that can survive the direct blast of nuclear bomb: cockroaches, disposed-of disposable baby diapers, and Velveeta, the processed cheesoid material sold in brick-sized lumps whose cartons seem to constitute the majority of the boxes in one section of one junk room. (Actually, I made that up. I don’t think disposable diapers were invented until after I was expelled from high school for passing out Bola Cola from the tailgate of my boyfriend’s station wagon outside the front gates of the school, because the principal, peering out from between bushes, had mistaken it for beer. In that brief moment, my hopes of being the only person canonized as a saint before dying went up in smoke. But that’s another story, as is the reason why I also lost all hope of wining the Nobel Prize in Diplomacy that day. Interestingly, they’re the same story, but that’s not important now.)


Getting back to trash: my spring cleaning fantasy is that we rent a giant sized dumpster, park it by the front door, and make about a hundred round trips between the junk rooms… (Yes you heard me – not only do we have junk closets (plural), junk outdoor sheds (plural) and junk piles in various and sundry rooms we occupy, we have - not one - but two entire rooms filled with junk.) …to make as many trips with a wheelbarrow between junk piles and dumpster as my stamina permits. Tolerance of other people is all well and good, but I’m developing serious intolerance of other people’s junk.

Lest you think I think I’m perfect, I too, have a heroic fatal flaw. Unlike junk, I have trouble leaving books and other written information behind. This might be the death of me since, as my sister recently told me, in these days of information overload, the pursuit of knowledge is less about a process of acquisition than about proficiency in tossing stuff out. But I'd rather die of information overload than from a concussion sustained by a falling stack of Velveeta cartons filled with mutant candles.

Clearly the recent rainy weather has left me with a bad case of cabin fever. At least in the yard, I’m in charge and junk is tolerated only so long as it amuses me and not a moment longer. I can’t wait to get back outside.