By Ken Lass
Sooner or later it was bound to happen, and now it has. At some point our Trussville home, which we have lived in for thirty-five years, was going to reach its stuff capacity. You know, that point where every cabinet, drawer, room, nook and cranny is packed with stuff. All kinds of stuff. We should have seen this coming. But Sharon and I are both sentimental pack rats, and this is what happens to our kind.
Ken Lass, Tribune columnist
So we have finally decided to bite the bullet, and start cleaning out. Easier said than done. Seems every time we begin sifting through the stacks of memorabilia and keepsake items, we try our best to build a discard pile. Then I look at the pile, and start having second thoughts. Something deep inside of me just doesn’t want to release these items to the trash man, even though I haven’t looked at them in years, and probably never will look at them again. There’s no point in keeping them, and yet I can’t throw them away.
There are boxes containing all the daily papers and art projects our kids brought home from school. It’s almost like I can see them growing up again by noting how their penmanship and spelling improved as they advanced through the grades. All of their journals and essays are here. Photos of their classes and sweet notes from their teachers. Ideally, you would like to pass these souvenirs down to the kids, but they have shown little interest in them. To me, they are memories. Sadly, memories we no longer have space for, except in the far corners of our mind.
There are boxes full of all the McDonald’s Happy Meal toys our kids collected through their childhood. All manner of Batman, Superman and all of their villains portrayed in tiny plastic models. We spent enough money at McDonald’s to own a franchise.
We have dishes. Lots and lots of dishes. We have my mother’s set, my grandmother’s set, and Sharon’s grandmother’s set. They all have that unmistakable look and design of the 1940s and 50s, adorned with images of flowers and log cabins and rustic borders. They’ve never made it out of the cabinet. Honestly, we use mostly paper plates at our house. But getting rid of Mom’s dishes makes me feel kind of guilty, like I’m throwing Mom out the door.
The downstairs closet is like a museum of the phases of my life, mostly measured in sports endeavors. There are tee shirts and medals from my triathlon phase (that was a long time ago). There are six, count them six, tennis rackets from my tennis phase, when I tried to be Jimmy Connors, but played more like Jimmy Carter. There is a bag of golf clubs loaded on a pull cart from when I determined to walk at least nine holes of golf every day. Didn’t take long to discover that golf was just a way to ruin a good walk. There is a Nintendo Wii video game system with four controllers, none of which seem to work. My mother’s ukelele is lying there in its black fabric case. Haven’t looked at it since she passed four years ago.
We used to be board game people. You can find several editions of Trivial Pursuit in our closets, along with Scrabble, Monopoly, Yahtzee, Uno, and more. They conjure up recollections of highly competitive family Scrabble games, where we would spend an hour arguing whether “poop” and “ugh” were real words. When the kids left home we stopped playing board games in favor of just parking in our recliners and watching mindless television. Many of the games are now missing pieces and inter-mixed.
Sharon taught preschool at our church for fifteen years, and children’s Sunday School for nearly a quarter century. She was gifted countless teacher appreciation trinkets, and she kept all of them. She treasures the memories, but the mementos have filled our closet shelves for decades, and its time to let them go.
In the garage sit battery-powered child vehicles that have been gathering cobwebs for decades. I stare at them, and envision my son and daughter driving repetitive circles around our driveway. We would panic when they got bold enough to steer out on to the street. There is a pair of old beach chairs, reminding me of our first journeys to the gulf with the kids. A plastic T-ball set and a child-size soccer goal we bought for the grandkids which they loved to play with in our backyard. We’ll likely never use these items again. Never even remembered we still had them. But throw them away? I’m struggling with that.
Sharon has discovered the Trussville buy and sell chat groups on the internet. She has had a lot of success selling much of our stuff. I guess the pain of parting with sentimental items is greatly relieved when someone gives you money for them. They say you can’t put a price tag on precious memories. Wanna bet? Try five or ten dollars on a used Christmas lawn inflatable.
Gradually, I am coming to grips with the reality that, if we don’t clean up all this stuff now, our kids will likely just dispose of it when we have left this earth. At least this way we get to decide what’s to become of it. It’s just that, when an item from your past leaves the house, a little bit of you goes with it. Little segments of your life you didn’t even remember you had.
Small reminders of how blessed you have been, and how thankful you should be.
