If I had still in my possession the things I once counted as indispensable to my peace of mind, not inclusive of real estate, it would require half an acre to park them. Cars and motorcycles, trucks and trailers, furniture, lawn mowers, carts and wheelbarrows come to mind as potentially useful albeit inert occupiers of space. And if I were to distribute them around my domicile in such a way as to create an obstacle course from my car to my front door, then I would be doing no less than women in my life have done with their paraphernalia: sewing machines, boxes, bags and blankets, old clothes, new clothes, shoes, shirts, singlets and shredders, not to mention silverware and glasses stashed in drawers and cupboards for an event that fails to materialize. Any agility they retain must be honed to a fine skill from having to negotiate a course through their detritus wherever they would wend their ways.
This was especially true of my mother-in-law, God rest her soul. Upon the death of her husband, her oldest girl imagined she would require some extra work, so she volunteered her elderly mother to sort items for sale in her church. The clerical busy-bodies filled the poor lady’s house with their junk and left her amidst the most unmanageable mess I’d ever seen in anyone’s dwelling. In one room where the rather frail old lady used to like to read, there were stacks of books waist high standing around the floor so that one had to behave like a snake to get to her chair. Trays of socks and shoes awaiting pairing lay on the floor in another room beneath tables holding blouses looking for hangers. The poor woman had no idea where to begin; when I saw her she was randomly picking up items and laying them down elsewhere, contributing to the chaos.
I seem to remember that the cure came in the nature of an exculpation: some other church factotum came with a truck and took it all to the dump. It was wonderful to see the old lady clear-eyed after that. Something along those lines I’ve been suggesting to my wife for years, but she doesn’t like to part with things.
Can you imagine a snake unwilling to part with its old skin or an ugly, grey water insect resisting transformation into a brilliant dragonfly? I’ve watched one of those insects crawl out of the water and up a reed where it wrapped its legs around the stalk and appeared to go to sleep. But as I watched, cracks, as in the rapid drying out of an exposed lake bottom, appeared along it abdomen and gradually spread to engulf the entire carapace.
When the creature reawakened, it stepped out of its former shell, inflated in little pulses the flimsy sacks along it back to produce four long wings with which it fanned the air as it held on tightly to the reed, turning around the axis of its perch. Meanwhile it was extending its abdomen into a long, shining blue “tail.” The metamorphosis had lasted forty-five minutes; when it was complete, the animal lay still, a broad-backed solar collector to the sun; then was gone in an iridescent flash and the lightest whir of wings.
I was with my young son at the time, resting on the sandy bank of the river after a hard sail in a strong summer breeze. We were both elated to have witnessed the transformation which glows within us yet as one of our best shared memories. When I speak of stages in our “shuffling off this mortal coil,” that metamorphosis comes to mind, and I wonder at the hesitation people feel in disposing of things they have grown out of.
A rule of thumb comes to mind: If you haven’t used something for longer than a year, you don’t need it, so get rid of it! That may be a little draconian, and I refuse to apply it to the tools in my garage, but I have no hesitation in applying the rule to my wife’s bags of materials, sewing aids, “crafting” adjuncts, old clothes and shoes, and whatever else lurks beneath the piles of junk in her bedroom.
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