Note: I originally wrote this for Owl's Farm, but then realized that it's just the thing needed to relaunch Owl's Cabinet of Wonders.
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| "Vallies" by Orra White Hitchcock |
We had a bit of a reprieve yesterday in terms of temperature, so I settled in the study, without the air con and only a small fan to blow the air about a bit. Out of doors it was only 93F with a little breeze, so I pottered around in the garden with Molly in the morning and got some things that needed doing done.
But the previous night had been a long one, during which time I stewed and mused about all the things I haven't been getting done and my fuzzy brain landed on my vast collection of stuff, the origins of my tendency to Not Let Go, and what might still be done about it before my time runs out.
I realized that although I come from a long line of quasi-hoarders, I tend be rather orderly about it: lots of boxes and bins, mostly catalogued and labeled, tucked away into nooks and crannies, the many closets that populate the house, the attic, the garage, and book cases in which books share space with collections of Supplies. No teetering stacks of old newspapers and pizza boxes ready to do us in, like in a Midsomer Murders episode. We once thought that my mother's family were examples of nominative determinism since Hoard was her father's last name, but realized that it's really just an aptonym).
The last year's distractions had kept me from executing the full implementation of my Swedish Death Cleaning enterprise, and the recent adoption of Alan into the household has resulted in the arbitrary inclusion in the Snug closet of shredded plush toys, chewed-up cushions, torn puppy blankets, and sentimentally preserved objects left over from previous beloved dogs. So, atop the boxed-up stuff lie new layers of all that.
The Museum of Unfinished Projects (AKA the hall closet) also has stuff piled atop the otherwise well-sorted goods, so there is now what seems like the equivalent of a shipping container's worth of goods to be gone through. I've attempted to make it more useful several times, and even wrote a blog post about that once (the link is to a previous post on the Cabinet). Fortunately, it's too hot to even think about dealing with the attic, the garage, the old garden shed, and the greenhouse/Wunderkammer.
In a little-understood fit of soul-less destructive energy, last week I very quickly went through at least ten years of New Yorker magazines that had been stashed in piles atop an old steamer trunk (maternal great grandmother's) that spends its time on the screened-in porch off our living room. I saved a few covers, plus a few a random articles or cartoons accidentally encountered during the two or three hours total it took me to get through those piles, and a few crosswords. All the rest went into the recycle bin, and what was saved amounted only to about a two-inch stack.
Now on the porch there's only left the final boxing up of things for the charity shop, and if the weather holds for another day, that can be taken care of as well. I'm now awaiting a similarly ruthless spell to allow me to toss the uncountable number of dollars' worth of dog toy remnants we've acquired just since Alan joined us at the end of October of last year.
As difficult as it is for me to deal with all the accumulated detritus of my life, I refuse to take full responsibility for the affliction. The genes that made me into an historian/geologist/archaeologist/story teller/reader and whatever else I've become, came from both sides of my family, and I learned packrattery from the best of instructors. My favorite place to visit when I returned to the US in 1962 was my Grandmother's house in Lone Pine and, more specifically, her garage--which I'm pretty sure had never been occupied by an actual car. She also had closets in the house, one of which held a couple of shelves of potential Pinochle tournament prizes, but nothing was nearly as interesting as the contents of that garage: ancient Paiute baskets given her by tribal women she knew while she was growing up in Big Pine; sound equipment from my grandfather's days as a square dance caller; cigar boxes of potsherds and obsidian arrow points; toys left over from her childhood and those of her own children, trunks of treasures I can't even remember specifically, but do remember sifting through, accompanied by her explanations of the contents. My last trip back to her house when she was 99 and moving to a rest home in Bishop, involved helping her son and her niece load up my rental car with mementos large (the metal lawn chairs we sat in to stargaze during summer visits and the Singer treadle sewing machine on which I learned) and small (one of the cigar boxes that held artifacts I later used during archaeology lectures).
A considerable amount of what occupies my own garage involves the remains of several Very Large Boxes shipped to my mother from her incredibly kind and indulgent benefactor, the late Fr. Bartley Scmitz, SVD, of Chiayi, Taiwan. When she was deported for a long-expired visa in the late '90s, Fr. Schmitz boxed up collections of photographs, photocopies, tear-sheets, negatives, household goods, clothing, and innumerable tchotchkes that she had accumulated when she returned to the island in the '80s. I've found homes for some of the historically useful images. but haven't yet had the gumption to go through the rest. But I can sense a rift in the sentimental logjam if only a break in the weather will occur before I succumb to the call of the genes and the remnants of whatever came over me last week fade entirely.
The difference between my garage and that of the fondly-remembered one in my father's mother's back yard is that Gram's held some fairly interesting bits of family history that had been preserved in the desert climate of the Owens River Valley. North Texas, on the other hand, with its dank moldiness and suffocatingly humid summers contributes only nesting materials for displaced wildlife. As long as I keep that in mind, I should be able to bag up what needs to go, and finally turn it into a facsimile of Joseph Cornell's (in)famous collection of potentially useful creative inspiration. Unfortunately, Faithful Readers, you'll have to make do with my lame approximations of his shelves of assorted inspirational materials (like "love letters to Jennifer Jones, unanswered" if I remember correctly). My post on Garden Wunderkammern was recently flagged by the Blogger Authorities as containing some manner of contraband, which may have involved copyrighted materials. So I'm providing a list of potentially interesting and inspiring media sources (books and websites) and showing you a snippet of what lurks in my hundred-plus year-old house's not-quite-as-old garage:
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