What’s that cloud’o dust risin’?

Okay Scribe, and Dick—if you dare—pin down the allusion:  “. . . nor heck a fury like a woman scorned.”  Or, in today’s application: a fury like a feeding frenzy.  No.  Wait.  I mean “like a cleaning frenzy.”  Which fury  heck hath nothing like. 

The definition of   “being on a tear”: realizing that you are piling stuff on the floor in front of cabinets and closets and drawers that are finally, after thirty years of living in the same house, so full of stuff you can’t put anything else in them.  And YOU DON’T EVEN REMEMBER WHAT, exactly, IS in them.

I can remember three or four times in my life when suddenly, I had to throw everything away.  You know this feeling?  Like you suddenly realize that you’re a prisoner of the past, or of that sense of use-it-up-wear-it-out-don’t-waste-anything (read: righteous thriftiness.  Pack-ratiness is next to Godliness.)  Or maybe it’s a reaction to long-term cowardliness: it’s WAY easier to stick something into a cabinet than to figure out what to do with it.    Which is fine if you have a basement, which we do NOT.

Or sentiment.  We have things that mean absolutely nothing outside of the fact that the thing got put in the basket in the bathroom twenty five years ago, and nobody ever moved it, so now the bathroom wouldn’t be home without it.  You know that feeling?

Then something finally roars: RISE UP.  THROW OFF YOUR CHAINS.  That’s exactly what it said.  Honest.  About two weeks ago.  And then G and I were talking about how the library is the lowest room in the house, which itself sits about eight feet below the level the river hits every run off (thank you army corps of engineers – love that dyke).  And all my family picture books (you know – the ones I started scanning and blurbing about a year ago – the ones that will take me at least another three years to get through?) are in that library.  On the bottom shelves.

Stairs: the perfect way-station.  When you don’t know what to do with stuff.  Leave it here for a few days—poised to go either up or down.  When you finally get sick of tripping over the stuff, you find a place for it.

But where to put them to keep them safe?  Every other square inch of the house is FULL.  This, dear ones, is what is known as motivation.

You know that game where you have that flat little square full of slidey numbers, and you have to get them to line up in order by moving this one up, then that one over – making this little space move around . . .yeah.  That’s the game I’ve been playing in my house now for about two weeks.  Because the photo albums really needed to be where the quilt books were.  And the quilt books –and here’s where it starts getting really crazy . . .

The quilt books in their first new location.  

You see a quilt book (or a beading book or a fishing lure book or a how to do tile book, whatever) and you fall in love with the cover and you spend $25 bucks on it, take it home and find out there’s one—maybe two—project in the entire book that you’d ever really want to do.  You with me?  And I had about two hundred and seventeen and a half  of these books, sometimes even duplicates (I must have really, really liked that cover) which were taking up about nine feet of shelf space.

I didn’t start taking pictures of the mayhem till about halfway through.  Photo albums now on the right, there.  Orderly looking, ain’t they?  Still below the flood line.  But accessible to the person scanning them all for future generations.  Genealogy and tech on the left.  Chocolate hidden in the middle.

So, in my fit of rebellion, I took a razor blade to them, cut out the patterns I liked, then hauled about five hundred pounds of eviscerated books (mostly intact, really) to the quilt guild, spilled them on the floor in front of the ladies, then stood back while the waters of the Amazon boiled.  The whole mountain of books disappeared in about three and a half minutes.  All to good homes.  It was hard.  I mean, here’s a picture of a quilt that truly knocks your eyes out, and you finally have to say to yourself, “You ever really going to make this?  Come on, now—this is ME you’re talking to here—”

A pile of puloined pages, waiting to be sorted, catalogued and filed – which I am sure will be done, someday after I am dead.  Quilt things tucked into the stack.  Cool bead project featured.

Since then I have taken on the beading books, the old Better Homes, the holiday mags, knifing out projects, pictures of the way I wish my house or garden looked, recipes I might actually try some day, advice about exercise, house designs, bead designs, fun things to do with grandkids – in the end, harvesting about a ten inch stack of pages out of a four to foot six stackof bound bliss. 

Then I attacked the actual books—the shelves behind the desk, the ones in the den, the ones upstairs.  Not with a knife, obviously (hey – I’ve always loved pages ten through eighteen of Sense and Sensibility).  In this case it was: you read it once, will you ever read it again?  Is this something to save for the grandchildren?  If there were a nuclear holocaust, and you had to become the neighborhood lending library, would you wish you’d kept this? 

Silas Marner did NOT make the cut.  I’m not sure Moby Dick did, either, seeing as we’re pretty darn far from the coast and nobody’s seen a whale in the Great Salt Lake for decades.  I can’t get to the kids’ novels because Chaz has double shelved them with about 100K of her own books.

I moved the quilt books into the den where the photo albums used to be – a fairly even exchange, then figured out that the kids’ picture books really should be down in the den where we’ll remember we have them should a grandchild who understands the language (any language) actually pop up in the house someday.  Which meant I had to clear out two books shelves in my room—the GM became book caddy.

More stacks.  Gin, Megs, Lorri—the rest of you whipper-snappers – heed the cautionary tale 

It also meant that I had to find open shelves in the treadmill/craft room. Which I couldn’t.  So I had to MAKE open shelves, which worked out because more kids’ books were stored up there.

I should have lost about six pounds by now from all the weight training. 

And did it stop here?  It did not.  It spread.  It spread to the cabinets behind my desk.  I WENT TO IKEA.  

Thirty years of books, kids’ drawings, interesting articles, certificates, letters, office supplies, school supplies, raw materials, quilt scraps, things shoved into boxes, bags, folders—design ideas.  They all have to go somewhere.  And it’s better if you sort of sort them – into boxes.  Nice little boxes with clear sides, so you can tell what’s in them.

Then I finally threw out the entire library of video tapes.  So help me, if they change formats on me again now that I’ve got all these red, green, white Ikea DVD  boxes all color keyed for Disney, family vids, romantic comedies – the NRA hasn’t moved me yet, but I could be persuaded  to storm the consumer media industry and demand my money back.

And it’s finally spread to dry goods (we have sixteen sets of single sheets – 2 actual beds, but you’ve got to have two sets of flannel and two sets of cotton for each one, don’t you?  And you can’t throw old sheets out till they’re really, really dead, even if you got some really cute new fish ones.  And three sets of queen sheets – one bed.  And about six sets of King – one bed.  At least forty pillow cases – yeah, the sheets are long gone, but pillow cases can last thirty years, easy.  And fifteen wash cloths. And about twenty five towels not counting the dog towels in the box in the laundry room.  Ummm— there are only TWO people living here on a regular basis.)

I even admitted finally admitted I was sick to death of our every-day plates.  No – the real admission was that I was sick of our special holiday plates—the ones given to me the night before we were married by a family member who said, “And if you don’t like them, my feelings will be hurt.”  (I didn’t know then about “registering,” which might have cut that off at the pass.  But no. It wouldn’t have done a thing.  I still would have gotten those plates.)

Boxes of things waiting to be re-located to the garage attic.  Taking up space in the front hall, right in front of the door.   “May I take them out there NOW?” my GM asks (oh, dogged tone).  But no.  My theory?  You leave it underfoot long enough, you’re gonna find the energy to get rid of it.

Mounds of linens, hauled down to the living room so that I can sort them while watching horse training videos.  Mostly flannel, which is not linen.  Or cotton.   Some dating to a year long before refrigerators were invented.  Including, quilty things, Christmas tree skirts, beach towels (see note about whales).   

Dog, not bothered.

What used to cover the desk.  Each pile a different area of my responsibility – the past, the present, the future, the IRS, the schools, the gas company. All to be filed. 

filing

moving

So now, the house is full of boxes and crates and bags—it looks like we’re freaking moving.  Everything in limbo.

Heaven, honestly, is having a basement.  But in our neck of the woods,  a basement more or less equals a swimming hole.  Besides, what, exactly, would be the virtue of storing stuff in a basement that other people could actually be using to keep themselves from freezing to death?

This is why I have not been answering comments.  Or paying bills.  Or sleeping.

The treadmill room.  Haven’t been able to open the cabinets for YEARS.  In Dickens’ day, this would be called “the lumber room.”

I am resetting my life.  Facing the irky small decisions I’ve danced around for thirty years.  So I can guiltlessly dance around the irky new small decisions for the NEXT thirty years.  Assuming that I live that long.

Here is the lumber jack.  Shamed into cleaning out his OWN cabinets.

In those three other times I’ve done this?  I always lose something important. Like my great grandfather’s cufflink, made out of gold that had been in the Irish family since back in the day when they were gun-runners and the English burned their house to the ground, and all their hidden gold melted.  Cufflink make into a necklace by my parents, way back, and given to me.  Yeah.  I threw it out in some old purse I must have been carrying when the chain had broken—

But nothing like that will happen this time.

Really.

The past.  Flying out the front door.