Spring Cleaning

I know you. You have secrets - in a shoebox on a shelf in your closet, a Rubbermaid bin in the corner of your basement, or, if you’re lucky enough to have an attic, a cardboard box crammed under an eave. You tell yourself that you will deal with them when you have time, but that stupid pull down attic door sticks, and it’s so hot up there in the summer and too cold in the winter, and, if you do make it up there, you have to walk around like some weird hobbit (all squatty and crumpled over with your chin sticking out and your eyes rolled up to your brows so you can look up and not hit your head on the roof rafters). Don’t worry, I don’t judge.

I know you didn’t ask for your grandmother’s wedding china, but it seemed so important to your mother for you to have it, and then, someday, pass it on to your daughter. And now your daughter lives in a third-story walk-up in the East Village and hardly has a kitchen, let alone a kitchen table. Can you imagine her balancing the gold-leafed Syracuse china on her lap as she eats her Trader Joe’s pork dumplings in front of her laptop? No, you can’t. Because we all know that anything with gold in it can’t be microwaved!

So you have the dinner plates, and salad plates, and dessert plates, and soup bowls, and those ridiculously small teacups that come with their own little plates, all nestled in yellowed packing paper inside the saggy cardboard box that your mother lovingly labeled FOR MY GRANDDAUGHTER as she was clearing out her dining room sideboard before her move to the Continuing Care Community in South Florida. Never mind that her granddaughter was eight at the time.

Well, friend, you’re not alone. We all have our stuff! And most of us are at a loss with what to do with it. The drawer full of candles? Your father’s old hockey skates? How about those home movies, photo albums, (or worse yet, slide carousels) moldering in the box on top of the gray industrial shelving unit in the garage? The question is more than just what to do with it. The real question is, Why do we keep it?

My children don’t want their old stuffed animals, big envelopes full of wallet-sized school photos, eighth-grade report cards, or any of the handprint Mother’s Day placemats. Do they? I hold onto these things because they are what’s left of those days when I was too busy to see how quickly they were passing.

Other things offer a glimpse of what we can do, what we can be: a good hostess, a clever interior designer, an artist, a woodworker, maybe a mechanic. The nuts and bolts on the workbench, the box of fabric in the basement, may look like junk. But they feel like the tools we could need for the next version of ourselves.

The problem is, all these things demand our time and attention. They need to be sorted, stored, passed on, or thrown away – rainy day activities that fill more rainy days than I want. You understand. Maybe you, too, spent a recent spring morning digging through dusty scrapbooks. Maybe the sun came out, and your friend called to go for a hike (or was it pickleball?). It doesn’t matter. I know why you piled everything back in a box and quietly slid it back under the eaves. Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.