There’s a house around the corner from us, set along a busy thoroughfare running through town, which has had stacks of books piled up on an enclosed porch in front for as long as I can remember. The entrance is lined with curtained windows through which passersby can see mountains of books surrounding the room, piled high into the middle of each window.
You couldn’t always see what was going on inside their windows until some trees in their front yard were blown down during Hurricane Sandy, revealing the stacks of books and papers that push aside curtains and seem to take up a lot of the space in the house’s entranceway.
We’ve even affectionately dubbed the people who live there “The Hoarders,” and actively monitored their post-hurricane activity.
“Oh, The Hoarders finally got that tree out of there,” I’d say to the kids, or “Looks like they’ve got a lot of stuff out back in that garage, too,” my daughter observed one day.
The thing is, I don’t feel like I’m judging the people who live in that house and allow things to pile up — other windows in the house belie a propensity to accumulate — because I tend to have a hard time letting go of things as well.
I just do a better job of hiding it.
All of my magazines tend to pile up – Real Simple, Oprah, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, People – spilling out of baskets in bathrooms and scattered all over the kitchen island.
Bills, mail and other paper detritus teeter in a giant bowl on a side counter in my kitchen and it’s so pretty, the bowl, painted black with a colorful rim and flowers along the bottom, which you rarely get to see since it’s always filled with permission slips and Pottery Barn catalogs.
Most surfaces in my bedroom are covered with stacks of self-help books, collections of essays on writing, camera parts and iPhone charger cords.
And the other side of my king-sized bed, when not occupied by a certain 11 year old, is a great place to store a couple of books, reading glasses and usually a dirty tissue or two.
But I don’t really have a problem with getting rid of all the reading material and plowing through the paperwork at least once a month. It’s more of a laziness issue, really, combined with a fairly high tolerance for clutter. But every so often I’ll walk around with a big, black garbage big and fill it with Ballard Design catalogs and Sexiest Man Alive issues of People and pay the lawn service and my gas bill (generally late because who can develop a system out of all those piles?).
But then there are the things that I could never part with, like pretty much every card I’ve received since college, Playbills (Rent!) and my children’s teeth. Oh, and some of mine, too — all four wisdom teeth plus a few incisors. It’s like I’m a character that would fit right into the Silence of the Lambs series, standing alongside Dr. Lechter and maybe stringing necklaces out of his victim’s teeth or something.
Total weirdo.
I’ve been holding onto various souvenirs from the past – old datebooks, postcards and notebooks filled with to-do lists and Easter menus from 2003 – stuffed in bags and boxes throughout my house for years. I recently pulled a couple of them up from the basement and was surprised to find a sheet of photos of me smoking a cigarette that accompanied an op-ed piece I wrote for my college paper circa 1988 about why I loved to smoke (really?) and extra copies of my wedding invitation floating around in a Ziploc bag. I mean that was like 24 years ago.
Like unearthing long-forgotten masterpieces, I found pictures my kids had drawn for me when they were small, potato-shaped figures with stick arms and floating faces with “MOM” painstakingly written beneath, more precious than any Picasso or Manet (can you tell I just finished reading “The Goldfinch”?)
It’s like I’m stockpiling artifacts for a museum dedicated to myself and my fairly ordinary life. Visitors will be able to inspect strips of sonogram photos, baby announcements, entries from my 1998 datebook including that my older daughter had Show and Tell on Sept. 28 and I got my hair done a few days later. Or even more foretelling, a card for my 27th birthday sent to me by a high school girlfriend, joking about the old ladies on the cover and wondering if we’d be like that “in 60 years,” who never made it past her own 45th birthday.
Just like the home movies I dug up a few months ago, it’s painful looking through all the memories, but when I can stand it, enlightening too. Looking through all the cards and notes I’m reminded how much my ex-husband and I loved each other and all the hopes and dreams I held not just for myself but for my children, too. And even though things didn’t work out the way that I had planned all those years ago, it wasn’t a waste but an important part of where I am today.
I’m reminded at how full my life has been.
So I’ll gladly give away that Banana Republic shirt that never fit quite right and clear books off my shelves that really don’t stand the test of time (so long, Mitch Albom). In the end those are really just things.
But after I’ve sorted through the giant Rubbermaid containers and assorted dust-covered cardboard boxes that are scattered about my den, I’ll carefully return all the items inside and hoist them back down to my crawlspace until it’s time for another retrospective of a very ordinary life.
Plus lots of teeth.
If I were the mathematical sort, I would try to calculate just how many hours there were between fall and spring semesters at the university that my two oldest children attend.
(I am sorry but at a certain point, even though I spent years toweling you off after baths and wiping your bottom, I do not want to see you in your underwear. We call that having “healthy boundaries.”)
I went to my annual cookie exchange the other night and as we sat around the hostess’s kitchen island eating the salad she prepared to balance out the fondue and Trader Joe’s wontons we’d been feasting on earlier, someone pointed to the elf perched high atop the cabinets.
The Elf didn’t start out as a thorn in my side.
And then came the inevitable: one day this summer my son opened a drawer of the pine hutch that sits in our family room, a piece of furniture generally of no interest to someone his age. The bottom holds all my china, silver and serving platters we pull out for Thanksgiving. The drawers are filled with placemats and assorted candlesticks. None of these are of interest to a 10-year-old boy.
Anyone who agrees with T.S. Eliot’s assessment that “April is the cruelest month” has obviously never spent time trying to be a mom in New Jersey during November.
