Friday, July 05, 2013

Friday, July 05, 2013

My beautiful wife has embarked on a venture of the greatest virtue.  She has a combination sewing area/crafts area/desk that has been accumulating invaluable objects for the last nine years.  The problem is that it has also been accumulating valueless objects for the same period of time and the mix ratio has gone way to the side of the eminently discardable.  For years when our homes did not afford her of the luxury of a large space all her own, it could frequently be heard as a direction to children,“Put it on Dad’s desk”.  Now the children are off making their own messes in their own homes, and while I still find spurious objects on my desk, many now land on hers.  She is a selfless woman with a willing hand in the Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, our church Young Women, children’s organization, women’s organization, the school choir, and the family, so she has had much cause to accumulate the detritus of the current emergency, with a follow on so quickly that there is scarce enough time to declutter.  Yesterday, I am happy to say, she found a fabric repair kit that I have been looking for since we moved into this home.  I did throw away the pair of pants I intended to use it on, but next time……  If the pictures she posted are evidence, my daughter, Jennifer, has independently begun the same task.  The clutter gene is one she has come by honestly, as I am not blameless in this regard.  My desk isn’t always tidy, but because it has been my responsibility to pay the bills and do the income tax return, I have been forced to go through the stack of paraphernalia in my office on a more regular basis, say a few times per year.  I have more room to put things than Beverly, however, and having never met a tool I didn’t like nor a building material I could see no future  use for, I have managed to accumulate a few odds and ends of my own.  My garage was envisioned as three bays with room at the end of the bays for shelving and a workbench on the far side of the shelves.  We planned the three-car garage so there would be room to park a sand truck in the garage in winter to keep the sand from freezing.  The sander has only been needed once or twice each winter, and maintaining it has become such a hassle, that applying it with a shovel from the back of a pickup has become easier and I have not used it for the last few years.  Consequently, the third bay has become one of the storage and work locations for materials and projects I might want to work on when everything else is beneath the snow.  I won’t even mention in detail the 20 foot shipping container, the 10x10 shed full of lumber, and the various other stacks of lumber and steel that is of incalculable value.  It wasn’t always like this.  During the 5 years of our marriage while I was in school and the 16 years of our military life together, we moved sometimes annually and at least every third year.  Moving is a great motivation to separate the “wheat from the tares”, and I developed a system that was quite efficient.  I would list every item in and around our residence on a tablet and categorize each item into one of several.  There were those things that would go with the  Movers, Hold Baggage (a smaller shipment that only took a month to move rather than several), Professional, Storage, Luggage, Yard Sale, Salvation Army, Return of borrowed things, and of course Trash. The Army allocates a weight allowance that it will move for the service member based on rank and family size.  As a Captain, I was allowed 11,000 pounds exclusive of Professional goods.  As a Lieutenant Colonel with 6 children on our final move, I was allowed 18,000 pounds.  For overseas tours, a smaller amount could be shipped to the duty station and the rest would be stored by a commercial moving company.  Because paying for overweight items was roughly $1 a pound, there was clear motivation to downsize.  We entered the Army from Boston and when we arrived there, everything we owned (except for a few things my Dad stored for us and which he assured us we would throw away when we returned, which we did) fit in the back of a ½ ton pickup with a shell camper.  When we left Boston, we had just 11,000 pounds, and we haven’t looked back.  My sister’s boyfriend, while looking around my parent’s home, asked my Dad who was going to take care of all this “junk” when he died.  He smiled and replied, “My heirs.”  I asked my son, Robert, if he was a little nervous looking over my collection, and he said, “Don’t worry about it, Dad”.  I’m not.