Me and Fibber McGee

The other day Bruce said he was tired of living in a warehouse. I replied that I would love to live in a warehouse; warehouses are huge. Right now we are living in a closet.
                                               
It’s true that our house is small, but that is not the problem. The problem is all the stuff in it. After all, there are plenty of families larger than ours living in single trailers. And then there’s the “tiny house” movement, where people live in places that are only 100 square feet total. Actually, when I first met Bruce, he was living in just such a tiny house, aka a vacation cabin that had been converted to year-round rental use, long before tiny houses became fashionable. I don’t think the place was much more than 100 square feet, certainly no more than 150. And yet it was homey and neat, and he had somehow managed to shelve and hang everything he owned so that the place felt plenty big enough (until I tried to take a shower and kept banging my elbows on the walls). Ironically, now we live in a place about 10 times the size of that cabin, and it feels tiny and crowded.

Why? Well, from where I sit, I see an expensive doll that’s been played with about five times in two years, a bottle of Rit dye with a little left in it that “might come in handy”, two shelves of cookbooks of which we generally use three or four and never crack the others, and a manila envelope decorated by my sister, which used to house some photographs she sent. There are antiques and quasi-antiques thrown up on walls and mantles (most not really arranged, just put). In a corner is a brown pottery crock containing a rarely used metal detector, an old-fashioned rolling mouse stick toy, a yard stick, a couple of wooden “swords”, a “bow” made of a bent stick and string, with a pipe insulation “arrow”, a stick horse, a baton, a feather duster, a watercolored fabric flag on a stick, a long cat toy that’s like a feather duster, a small broom, two walking sticks, a dowel, and a random piece of one-by-one wood. This is just one crock in one corner of the house. Almost every corner looks like this, and not just the corners. The cabinet under the TV is stuffed with blankets and quilts, as is the hall closet. We wouldn’t even need this many blankets if our house became a Red Cross shelter in the next ice storm! (We should get rid of some, yet how do we pick which ones? They are all cozy, and many were gifts; two were Cedar’s bed comforters as she’s grown up, and how can we throw that part of her childhood away?)

Looking into the kitchen, I can see a teddy bear in a pirate kerchief next to my daughter’s placemat on the table. This table gets cleared off periodically, but within 24 hours is always re-covered with newspapers, mail, papers brought home from school, wallets, keys, pocket change, to-do lists, and, obviously, stuffed animals and other toys. Two of the five chairs are generally un-sat-upon in our family of three. They are layered with sweaters, coats, hats, snow pants (yes, already!), and bags. The stairs going up to our bedroom are no better. They hold the newspaper box; brushes, combs, and potions for Cedar’s wild hair; tissues; books to be returned to the library; the pumpkins we painted for Halloween; anything needing to go upstairs; and all the papers we’ve taken off the table to make room for eating.

I have just described maybe 10 percent of the stuff I can see from where I’m sitting in the living room. Just think of the bedrooms; the bathrooms overflowing with magazines (the New Yorker comes every week!), towels, gifts of soap and bath salts (not to mention the litter box and all its accoutrements); and the back office in which we can barely turn around, let alone stand up, because above us is a loft full of, guess what, more STUFF!

We have gotten rid of many things, but still we are drowning in them. Over the past couple of years we have given boxes and boxes of books to the library sale, and recently we threw away crates of old music cassettes and video tapes. These were emotional partings. Those tapes had held the music of our teens and twenties, as well as mixes lovingly made for us by friends. And it’s not that we don’t still own a cassette player, because we do, but we never play tapes anymore, so it was logical to toss them. Unfortunately, logic and emotion don’t mix well. It’s been months since the tapes went to the dump and just last night Bruce was still lamenting their loss.

It’s amazing that we did let go of the tapes. Normally around here, emotion wins. I have never been able to bring myself to throw away my sister’s envelope because she spent so much time decorating it with magic marker shapes. And then there is all my daughter’s art. I have trouble even tossing coloring book pages that took no creativity whatsoever, let alone her actual artwork. And then there are the toys. Even she (a serious pack rat) is finally starting to feel weighed down by the amount of stuff she has, so she proposed getting rid of a children’s Sudoku game. She never plays it, but it has these beautiful little jewel-like animals to place in the squares. She was willing to let it go, amazingly, but I wasn’t. I love those little animals!

Basically, our house is one loooooong paragraph in the story of our life, full of words and sentences that have just enough meaning to resist being tossed aside, but still overwhelming to both reader and writer alike. Natalie Goldberg, in her wonderful book Writing Down the Bones, says that writers should be samurai, cutting away all the fat from our work. I can generally do that with my writing. After all, words come easily; I can always replace them. But how do I replace the Guess Who game, made for three-year-olds, that Cedar and her friend Reuben used to play for hours every day? It has not come off the shelf in ages, except to afford access to something underneath, and yet if it were gone, I think I would feel the hole in my life forever.

I have a feeling we’ll be in this closet for a long time.