Clutter

Now that the boys are launched into their new school year, I am left to evaluate my summer goals. Did I mention that I had goals? I bet you didn't think I was the goal-making type, but actually, I came up with three goals for the season. Goal number one was starting this blog. Check! Number two was turning something from my dissertation into a publishable article. Since this was unpleasant, I reassigned it to the fall. That leaves me with goal number three: cleaning the garage. To me, it is still summer (temperatures in the 80s, no obligations), so I think I need to get this done.

The thing is, the garage is the only storage place in our house. And let's just say that we haven't been very good at throwing things out over the last, oh, 10 years or so. When we moved from our apartment to the house, the boys were 14 months old and we couldn't be bothered with organizing. So we just shoved stuff into boxes, marked them "miscellaneous junk," and put them in the garage. Soon it became difficult to walk through the garage, so when something needed to go in there, we just heaved it onto the monstrous pile. Now it looks like one of those messes that gets a person flown to the Oprah show to have a heart-to-heart with Dr. Robin about hoarding.

I'm not a hoarder (really), but I am a collector. And this whole garage cleaning problem brings up some questions for me. When can the memory of a person/time/event stand on its own, without an object attached? Surprisingly, I'm pretty good at making this distinction with the kids' stuff. Those of you with children know that the amount of art work that a single individual can produce is staggering. At first, you might save every little scribble, but after a while the sheer volume of it becomes unbearable. You learn to say, "Oh, sweetie, ANOTHER abstract rendering of a circus. How lovely!" And then you chuck it. Now I just keep the most special things -- like the family portrait that Green produced last year, the one that had the caption, "Mommy is a better pitcher than Daddy."

It's a totally different story when it comes to stuff from my own childhood. When I was a kid, I collected wacky pack stickers, buttons, and Madame Alexander dolls. I clipped newspaper articles from the day MTV debuted and from the day the Challenger exploded. Did you ever write me a letter where you told me all about your first love? Well, I kept it (oooh, I smell some blackmail potential...). I saved stuff, lots of stuff. Here's an example. When I was 15, I had a crush on a boy, and I wrote about him all the time in my journal (oh yeah! Did I mention the journals? I have enough to fill a whole trunk). Here's a short excerpt:

I can’t tell if he likes me, and that bothers me a lot. I mean, he walks around with me, he talks to me, he says hi to me in the halls. But it seems to me that he does that to a lot of people…The best b’day present I could get would be if I got some miniature sign on Monday that he likes me!

Then Monday came, and I followed up with this:

I may have got my sign. I can’t really tell... I ate lunch with X today. Afterwards, he walked me to my locker. I opened it and was getting my books out, and he threw a candy bar in! I was thrilled beyond believable belief.

And here's the thing: I taped the candy bar wrapper into the journal. Because the object was so important to the event, I had to save it.

When I read this 22 years later, it looks like I have a piece of garbage in my diary. But back then, the wrapper held the promise of the moment, that a boy I liked might actually like me back. (So what do you think happened after this? It's a choose-your-ending romance story! Did this boy a) follow-up with a bouquet of roses; b) ask me to the Christmas dance; or c) ignore me? Take a guess.)

I like to reconnect with all these things, because I'm a historian at heart. I love archives, where you can go through folders and actually touch and feel old documents. Without those old papers, there's no history. Details get lost. People get lost. But at some point, the boxes get too full, the piles get too big, and decisions have to be made. What goes, and what stays?

Blue and Green have complicated the issue, because they, too, are collectors. They gravitate toward earthen things: sticks, twigs, rocks. Last weekend, we went to the beach, and the boys brought their buckets for gathering shells. At the end of the afternoon, Green brought over his bucket to show me his findings. Inside, there weren't rocks or shells. Instead, he had picked up countless pieces of the dead crabs that had washed up on the shore. And he wanted to bring them home. "No way," I said. "But mama," he whined, "It's for my collection!" "No," I said, holding firm. Candy wrappers from crushes, I get that. But dead crustacean parts? Forget it. Not in my garage.