The Mast-Head: My Spring Break
My wife and the kids got out of town the week before last and I took to the basement with a vengeance. It had been something I had intended to do for a long, long time.
After three kids and about 16 years since Lisa I got married and moved into my childhood house, things had, to put it mildly, accumulated. The basement, more of a glorified crawl space for anyone taller than a “Wizard of Oz” Munchkin, has been the receptacle of much of the excess. The weekend plus the few days I would have to myself seemed the perfect time to de-clutter in a big way.
As I dug through the piles, bags, and boxes, I had to fight a familiar pack-rat instinct. Helping me along, though, was retelling myself over and over again a story my father told about an Amagansett hoarder in whose house was discovered, among many other things, a box labeled “Strings Six Inches and Under.” Try mumbling that to yourself the next time you are confronted with a plastic bin full of mismatched mittens; it helps.
There are two advantages to tackling household purges when your kids are away. First, there is a sharp reduction in distractions. Then there is the special bonus of being able to run off to the landfill with all those half-destroyed toys and tattered stuffed animals, which they might otherwise insist on keeping.
Doing the math, if each of our three kids averaged only a single item brought home each week apiece, that would have added up to more than 1,400 objects that either had to be rapidly de-accessioned or put away, and that’s not counting all the clothing they grew out of or hand-me-downs they have yet to wear. Then there are my interests, notably fishing, which is as much a gear obsession as anything else. It took three trips to the recycling center to haul away what was not worth giving to charity or friends.
Suffice it to say, the project rolled over into the week after they got back, but progress had been made. We can now see the basement floor, and new metal shelving that I bought in Riverhead is helping with a semblance of order. The temptation, of course, will be to let the basement just fill up again. But as long as I keep repeating “string, six inches and under” to myself we should be fine.