My basement is a cross between a Bottomless Pit and Memory Lane. Not a surprising outcome when accumulate stuff for 12 ½ years without throwing out hardly anything.
Halloween 1975, Age 7
I have recently recruited my Sistah to help me clean my basement (if ever there should be an award given for Best Friend of the Year, she’s earned it and then some after this undertaking, alone!). You cannot FATHOM what kind of disaster the wasteland we call our basement has become. No one is allowed in my basement except me and hubby, because there’s a very real possibility they’d never again be seen. And I’m not exaggerating. At all.
Me - 8 years old, Third Grade
You see… I am a packrat. There. I said it. This has been me, forever. Every bedroom, locker, or personal space of any sort: messy. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Polly Stevens, my third grade teacher at Brooklyn Elementary School, told my mother that in all her 30+ years of teaching, she’d never before seen a student who needed two desks. Sadly, while many women in my family have been endowed with the cleaning gene, I must have run to the bathroom instead of getting in the line where God’s proxy handed those out.
Oh, the things I have found! For example, I found evidence of my first college internship, which was at a computer store that the likes of Best Buy and Circuit City eventually put out of business. It was there that I learned how to write press releases; I also learned that, when working with salesmen, being well-dressed is a huge asset. Being a size 3 never hurts, either. Mind you, this was completely at odds with all of the feminist theory that I was learning about and believed in so strongly, so it was a troublesome, if undeniable, truth to accept.
Me, Age 13, Seventh Grade
Next to the Computerland folder I found books – legal compendiums, legal strategy series, etc. — that I’d worked on in my second internship, at a legal publisher. This would have been right before the real dawn of QuarkXpress and PageMaker, so 80% of my job description was doing paste-up (putting paper through a machine that laid a coat of wax on the underside, which served as an adhesive, that you then “pasted up” on to a board that would eventually be used to make printing plates). And then there were supercomputer manuals from my third internship, back before parallel processing or efficient microprocessors, when a supercomputer took up huge rooms that had to have extremely stringent climate control systems and elaborately reinforced floors.
Chicago Viewed from the Sears Tower, circa 1979
And there are memories galore, even older than those. My (once) favorite Holly Hobbie Christmas ornaments. A few volumes of my once-complete, highly prized Trixie Belden book series. Photos of my first trip to the Sears Tower: 24 blurry shots taken from the top of the world with my first camera, a Kodak Tele-Instamatic. While I was only about 7 hours from home, I felt like I’d travelled to another dimension. Not a feed store in sight. Instead of smelling cow manure around every corner, I caught whiffs of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River (the latter no better than the former, just different). Stoplights for as far as the eye could see. Skyscrapers, street signs, and cabs replacing barns, barbed wire, and John Deere-green farm equipment.
Gramma Arts' Crewel Stitchery
And still more: my Confirmation class picture. An old Polaroid of me picking out my first kitten. Artifacts from relatives and friends who have long since journeyed to heaven: a portrait of my great-grandfather; crewel stitchery done by my gramma (and I distinctly remember what color nail polish she was wearing when she started it); an ancient heirloom silver tea set fit for a queen, which I have never once used, that I received as a gift from a family I babysat for while in college. High school yearbooks. The first piano lesson book I successfully completed (I wonder if the Schaum series is still a respected method of teaching piano…?). Ed. Note: OK, I just had to look up the Schaum books, and sure enough, they’re still touted as a superior method.
My 1996 Milwaukee Marathon Medal
The medal I earned by running the 1996 Milwaukee marathon. Pictures of my stepsons through the years, including the one showing the youngest (Little L) wearing my Playtex rubber gloves to string lights on our Christmas tree. The oldest one (The Dogg), scarecrow skinny, atop a peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, braced against a stiff wind. Countless programs from their respective sporting events (does one receive bonus points that can accrue to, um, “help” you at the Pearly Gates, just in case heading one way or the other isn’t clear…?). The Dogg’s prom pictures, Little L’s school pictures, a poem Little L wrote to me and left for me to find under my pillow. All the stuff that came before the intense pain and fragmented reason that comprised their teen years. The little ring-bearer pillow from my wedding, carried by my nephew, who was about 2 at the time (he just turned 15!)
Me at the Juke Box, Probably Out for Fish Fry with My Grandparents
I was recently talking to a mom of one of the girls in Kate’s Daisy troop, and something came up about taking advantage of yard sales and garage sales to find gently used kids’ clothes. This led to talk about estate sales, and the kinds of sales people have when they’re transitioning from independent living to assisted living, a nursing home, or even the next life. I have gone to quite a few of these sales, as hubby thought perhaps it could be lucrative to find undervalued things and make a tidy profit on Craigslist or eBay. (Yeah, right. Enter needle/haystack metaphor.) And I would walk through these older, respectable homes, and think: this is all there is left of a life, or of two lives, or of a family. This is it: tired furniture. An old-fashioned juicer. An ancient “beaters” with a bicycle-pedal-style handle. Aged books with broken bindings and cryptic inscriptions. A ball peen hammer that, the great-grandson of the original owner told me, was hand forged.
Our Ring Bearer Pillow, 1997
It astounds me to think: these are the physical remnants we leave behind. And this weird drive we have, this hunger that we cultivate that somehow urges us to acquire and accumulate things – more things, bigger things, cooler things – it’s so silly. So inadequate. So ridiculously stupid. Because if we’re spending time chasing the next purchase, the next acquisition – which will eventually be donated to a charity, or sold for pennies on the dollar at some garage sale or auction – we are overlooking the time we can spend building the lasting legacies: relationships. The give and take of generosity, and kindness, and love. All things I need to remember to counter my impatience when I am teaching Claire how to braid her Barbie’s hair. Or spying on the newly laid eggs in the robin’s nest with Kate. Or reading yet another princess story to Amy.
Ok, well, maybe cleaning once in awhile isn’t such a bad thing after all.
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