I’m 37, and I’m growing increasingly more terrified to get older. There, I caught your attention, and you probably cracked a rueful smile. However, the joke’s on you because I’m not worried about getting older for reasons you might suspect. (That’s coming, I’m sure.) I’m worried because I wonder how many more possessions I have to tote around for the rest of my life. Personal stores are like Sisyphus and his boulder only worse because Sisyphus’ boulder stayed the same size. Ours get bigger while we get weaker. And it’s when we decide to clean out those old boxes that our stuff rolls back on us and everything goes downhill.
After three years of living in our house, my wife and I decided to finally get our basement in order, and I’m suddenly in awe of all the sh!# we have.
We were lucky to buy a house with a finished basement, and because our house was a model home and the basement was the “design center” for the subdivision, our basement is pretty decked out, making it a living area that rivals the upper two floors, so we’ve harbored a degree of guilt for designating it a storage facility. And not even an orderly one. When we moved in and drop a box, that’s where it’s stayed, leaving only room for a central walking path with various tributaries that dead-ended at The Great Wall of Old Christmas Decorations or the Annals of Financial Records Dam. A year ago we had a structural collapse, and integrity crumbled. We no longer had access to The Library of Old Photo Albums or (and this was the most disappointing) The Kitchen Crap Armory. I really could have used that Cuisinart from 1978, damn it!
We were telling ourselves since year one that âWe need to get down there,â but with the upper floors to tend to and then out of pure laziness, we let the basement go to sham- bles, which isnât a declining characteristic in our storage skills. At our condo, we had a one-car garage that rivaled Fred Sanfordâs yard. Donât believe me? Check out the photo! (Take that Fred Sanford!)
Intent upon not letting that happen to our basement, enough was finally enough, and my wife and I decided to attack this mess with merciless decisiveness: If we donât absolutely want or need or re- member it, it goes. My brother took a similar approach a few years ago, cleaning out his crawlspace: âIf I hadnât opened the box it twenty years, I threw it out.â
Finding his ruthlessness drastic, though, we at least decided on the Open and Sort method before deciding a box’s fate. Halfway through the process, I stood back and surveyed what my wife and I took nearly twenty years to collect and what I saw was wreckage. And when you step back and survey the keepsakes of twenty years in one, open sprawl, it’s not memories you’re looking at. It’s wreckage.
Floating in this sea of sorts were islands of old and disused furniture, including a couch, three armchairs, numerous coffee tables and end tables and reading tables and work tables and drawing tables and eating tables and desks and night stands and several mismatched chairs and a dresser and an armoire. Let’s also not forget the ubiquitous exercise equipment that was used maybe twice. (I swear people buy exercise equipment just to store it, making moving it the only workout you get).
I felt like a Bedouin, looking at a life of things, heavy things, we’ve been dragging around for years. But when nearly two hours went by one night when my wife and I relived memories stirred up from the things we found, I realized that no matter the full weight of the things we carried all these years, keeping stuff is kind of worth it, and organizing and sorting and cleaning out is really only a mask for salvaging memories.
Of my old toys, my mother always told me, “Don’t throw that out. It might be worth something someday.” Although my old toys are practically worthless, and I seriously doubt they’ll ever gain value in my lifetime (or anyone else’s, for that matter), I suspect she’s right. I suspect that the things we keep only gains in value the older we get and the longer we have it. Even of the bad memories some of the items we have reminds us of. I’d like to believe that even bad memories are good memories and that the wreckage of sorting through a life creates tells, “Look, we’re still here, still together, and this is everything it’s taken to accomplish that.”
In this way, sure, I’ll tote that couch around for another twenty years.
