Stacks of packing boxes crowd the basement, along with disused appliances, discarded clothes, dented bicycle helmets, abandoned skis, a chandelier nobody liked and a couch someone might actually want someday if the mice don’t claim it first.
The German Christmas ornament that once delighted the children is stashed in a corner, its missing pieces left behind in an attic 3,000 miles away. The basement smells salty and damp, like the faraway dockyards where these boxes languished for a time.
For 10 years, I pretty much stayed out of the basement. The room was a reproach for bad housekeeping and a plea for order. I would tackle it later — next summer, next year, when I stopped working. Besides, those National Geographics might come in handy some day. Better hold on to them, along with my mother-in-law’s needlepoint samplers and my aunt’s elaborately framed collage commemorating a European grand tour.
Some things are tough to toss out.
Even so, there comes a day of reckoning, a day when the odds and ends have to be organized for the dump, given away or preserved for the next generation.
Almost everyone I know is ready, even eager, to get rid of stuff. By everyone, I mean mainly women of a certain age who’ve acquired and accumulated and now acknowledge that those old Joni Mitchell LPs won’t play in the afterlife. Time to get rid of them.
Decades ago, we were busy consuming and collecting; now we’re consigning and considering the upside of downsizing. Our sons and daughters aren’t interested in the Limoges gravy boat or the porcelain keepsakes wrapped in newsprint. No point in keeping them then. The antique Pewter mugs my father displayed on the mantle go to the auction house, the Legos to a child keen to have them. The grandchildren yet to be born will just have to start over.
It takes a long few days, four people and repeated trips to the landfill to clean out the basement. I rummage through cartons filled with family photographs, letters and college essays typed long ago in dim lamplight. I find Polaroids of the post-war suburban house where I grew up. I find official papers, including my father’s formal request, circa 1939, to change his surname from the recognizably Jewish “Cohen” to the more ambiguous, Anglicized “Stearns” — a hedge against jackbooted soldiers marching across Europe. And then I come to the sepia photographs of my great-great grandfather, tailor to the king of Bavaria, who never knew what was coming.
Here is my life story, then, long preserved in cardboard, now in plain sight. I’m still sorting it out.
