Da Clutter

Our towering, 40 by 30-foot shop with three giant roll-up doors, taunts me each day. When I designed it, I planned it to be perfectly aligned with the driveway, simplifying backing a vehicle into place. One entire wall is fit with commercial shelving in Costco blue. 14-foot tall, 5-foot deep shelves that could hold a small house, built to organize and protect the black and yellow Home Depot tubs bought at a pretty penny and stacked, empty, to the side. I envision them housing only carefully curated bits and pieces of the stuff. At least this has been the plan for the past five years.

Instead, the cars languish outside in the weather and the entire floor of the shop is stacked with teetering piles of unsorted miscellanea where it is prone to mouse invasion, covered in dust, and completely unorganized. The Costco-shelves are packed, willy-nilly, with a mixed assortment of hastily stowed Christmas decorations and small forest worth of old paperwork in unlabeled banker’s boxes. There’s also a Jenga stack of slumping moving boxes, full of clothes that are mostly vintage 1990’s fashion that haven’t seen the light of day for decades. These boxes are labeled vaguely with the names of rooms from past houses. A quarter-century of organizational systems stretch to the walls. All have failed at organizing anything, not because they’re not genius in their design but because we have failed at implementing them.

How did this stuff-tsunami happen?

My dreams – day and night – are full of plans to take control, walk into that shop, and pound out an organizational strategy that makes most of the stuff disappear and the rest, magically fold itself into labeled tubs that are rolled out, at least annually, for specific seasons. I can picture the vehicles, tucked in, warm and dry, where we back in easily and step from them, out of the weather and without fear of being buried under an avalanche of twenty-five-year-old must-saves. I envision carefully printed labels, affixed at perfect angles, directing me to the exact item I am in search of with library-like precision.

On a regular basis, I suit up in protective clothing, water bottle in-hand for hydration, music blaring from the phone in my back pocket, full of ambition that TODAY is the day I will prevail and the shop will metamorphose into an organizational butterfly that works for us. Generally, within a few minutes, I’m standing amidst the chaos, holding a single item that has caught my attention while I reminisce about its origin and apparent necessity, completely ineffectual and drained of all energy to move forward. The shop is my nemesis and my constant reminder of my inability to sort, label, and get rid of the things that trail us like wafts of a stale fart.

Why does this stuff have such a hold on me and why do I cling to it so effectively? I have thought about this a great deal over the years and have some academic conclusions that help me to justify my lack of ability to clear out and wrangle the remains into sensible categories. Rampant consumerism and insatiable materialism come to mind, as does the societal propensity to grow to the size of one’s fishbowl. Theories worth study but largely unhelpful in explaining and solving the problem.

I can trace some of my hoarding roots to a time when I didn’t have much to hoard. In my early 20’s, I was a young single mom, trying to survive with three kids on a secretary’s salary. Money was in short supply and I was often stuck with decisions like fill up the car or buy groceries. I exercised thrifty creativity on a regular basis and learned how to make-do. This lifestyle was not without its benefits as I learned survival skills but it also wired my brain with the fear that if I got rid of something, I might not be able to afford it again, ever.

I shopped thrift stores, gathered hand-me-downs, brought home leftovers given to me by the restaurant at my work, gardened, canned, and froze any hint of abundance so that I would never have to face that fear of lacking clothes for my kids to wear or food to eat. That fear, and my response to it, dug roots deep into my psyche. It’s a response that still manifests itself today despite my general lack of need. I know I can calm down because if I need something I have given away, there’s a good chance I can just buy a replacement. But that sense of calm remains elusive.

I am also guilty of an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. My love of feeding people is most evident when my table is surrounded by family and friends. I’m know I’m not alone in this but I take it one step further and revel in my ability to feed a small army. Those who know me know that I am only exaggerating a smidge when I say this.

Unlike those who rattle around in a kitchen branded with Vulcan and Sub-Zero while opening bags of restaurant take-out, I use my kitchen to its capacity on that rare occasion when I’m cooking for more than just the two of us. “If you don’t have it, does that mean they won’t come?” This seems to be my sticking point to paring down the collection. They do come – occasionally – and I am ready. But the rest of the time, the shop has the appearance of a dusty restaurant supply store.

Another source of my stockpile-mentality stems from the time, several years ago, when Jeff and I got lost in a series of deaths. Within one year, we each lost a parent (my father, his mother). As caretakers for his mother, we inherited the responsibility to manage the accumulations of 50 years of marriage plus the next 10 years of frantic shopping that, as a lonely widow, his mother used to fill the gaping hole left by her husband’s passing. We emptied the house and brought most of it home, unable to sort through the emotion and memories at the time.

Around the same time, Jeff’s friend Rob also died, leaving my husband in charge of his estate which included a house full of his memories and stuff. We grimly sorted out the life of a 54-year old man with no kids, partner, or parents who could draw the thin lines between an item and what it meant. Again, we brought most of it home to deal with later. The ubiquitous “later” that can be drawn out into weeks, months, years, even decades.

On more than one occasion, Rob’s stuff has given me pause. Most notably when I held a tiny pair of moccasins that surfaced in his home as we were closing it up. They were tied together with a simple piece of yarn that carried a note, written in an unfamiliar yet motherly-looking hand, stating these were Rob’s first shoes. The note included a faded picture of a baby Rob, smiling through his recognizable cherub cheeks, wearing the beaded moccasins on his tiny feet.

My indecision about how to proceed with this very specific item has stymied me on more than one occasion. Donate the moccasins to charity? Would I then be donating a piece of his history that would then be lost? Would the note and the picture be plucked away from the tiny shoes, severing the connection forever? Should I keep them? Why? They held little significance to my family and the meaning ran the risk of drowning in our own pool of stuff. His house held 54 years of similar untethered memories that had lost their connection to the one person left who understood their significance and importance. Now, the moccasins sit in the shop, on top of a dusty box that holds the ashes of one of Rob’s favorite dogs. Another story lost.

These deaths did stir the knowledge that you can’t “take it with you” and I am ever-cognizant that I am building my own shop of memories – shop of horrors? – for my family on my passing. But in the meantime, I face this trove of ghosts, lurking in the chaos of the stuff.

In the end, these are all great reasons and very poor excuses for the disorganization and mess that plague me. I have had offers over the years from the kids and others to “be brutal” and get rid of anything that doesn’t have use and place in my current life. But I hesitate to accept the help when I know I will end up defensively gathering back the things that I can’t release for reasons that no one else can understand.

Fast forward to today and the fact that the very act of writing this is my excuse de jour to not tackle the job at hand. I can see the ominous doors from where I sit and I know that I should be out there, cleaning, sorting, getting rid of things. We have a trailer stacked with open boxes destined for donation and a work truck with an 8-foot bed, ready to take those items that cannot – should not – be saved, to the dump.

I will sign off here, hit play on my phone’s Spotify playlist to set the ambiance, fill my water bottle, don the gloves and protective gear necessary to protect me from the dust, mouse droppings, and memories that await, and then I will walk resolutely to the shop where I will open those doors and get to work. I will fight every urge to pick up that one box of baby clothes that is always my distraction. I will leave the tiny moccasins on their dusty box. I will get to work, setting a location marker so rescue teams know where to find me, in the off-chance that I end up buried beneath one of those unruly piles of the past.

There’s a chance I will finally find the shop of my dreams out there. Or I will wander back inside after only a short time and relegate that dream to yet another day. We shall see how this goes.

Author’s note: We accomplished great things in the shop today. We confirmed that there is, in fact, a floor. I also managed to finish my Christmas cookie baking which is noteworthy as one of my more epic excuses to avoid cleaning the shop…  On this, the 14th of January.

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