It is almost time for spring cleaning — my least favorite time of year. Maybe that’s because on top of the dust it always raises — and to which I am allergic all year round — there is the additional threat of pollen from everything blooming outdoors. Yes, it’s all beautiful, until it triggers more allergies and the inevitable sinus infection. Thank God I have all these left-over N95 masks.
Or maybe I just don’t like cleaning. Or neatening. Or — this much I know is true — getting rid of clutter.
So many people ask me to do it. They even offer help: “I can drag this to the curb for you, Judy.” I have received that offer regarding everything from books to snow tires and every time my answer is the same: “If I wanted that at the curb, it would already be there.”
Doesn’t everybody have a gently used poker-table-top in their garage? Waiting for someone to prop it up on a couple of milk crates and start a back-alley game?
Or a bag of old Legos and another of plastic dinosaurs, waiting patiently for a new owner?
I could get all those things out of my jurisdiction pretty easily — they’re all bagged up and ready to go. Even with a bad back, I can place the phone call for a charity’s pick-up.
That’s not the part I need help with. What I really need is someone to sit by my side, without sneering, while I weigh the relative merits of keeping a shopping-bag full of 20-year-old versions of my resume vs. letting them go. Especially when I know that the day after I let them go, I will need to fill out some government form asking for those two-decade-old start and end dates — dates that, thanks to the world’s infatuation with decluttering, I now have no way of knowing.
So I keep the bag.
And my worst problem — my Kryptonite, if you will — is all the random, miscellaneous paper in boxes and shopping bags and plastic storage bins. If I had to spitball, I’d say it’s 1 percent personal letters; 49 percent notes for projects, or from long-ago PTA meetings; and a solid 50 percent junk mail: catalogs that have long since expired, credit card offers that were never a good idea even on the day I got them, plus an indigestible clump of coupons for Bed Bath & Beyond.
Oh, and all our old bills.
Worthless! All of it. Almost. And I just can’t pitch out a bag or a box without making sure that there isn’t part of that 1 percent hiding in between everything worthless.
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I tried the other day. It was mid-afternoon, and I’d finished cooking dinner ahead of schedule, so I sat down on the couch with one of the infamous shopping bags that I can’t seem to get rid of.
And was instantly reduced to tears because there was a note from my first-born’s kindergarten teacher about how he is finally talking to the other kids. That has to stay.
Then I got into a rhythm of pitching papers into the trash with both hands, when something else fell out. A hand-made holiday card, with a photo of my other child and a hand-lettered message around the frame: “I wish my brother a Happy New Year.”
Except — wait a minute. What it actually says, in crooked capital letters, is “I wish my BOTHER a Happy New Year.” This is the first time I noticed that. Intentional? Freudian? Either way hilarious! And obviously something that must be saved.
Certainly not something I could ever let anyone “just take to the curb.”
It’s late afternoon, the sun is sinking, and I’m rapidly running out of emotional strength to do this any longer. Besides I have to clear my workspace, also known as the dining room table. Quick! Shove it all back in the bag.
And that, dear friend, is how my home got so cluttered.
But now it is my children, begging me via text to at least make a dent in the clutter.
So, with a heroic final burst of energy, I collect all the catalogs and coupons, with a smattering of expired “final notices” decorating the top and put it all at the curb.
At last, I can send out the triumphant emails: “In your name, a bag of clutter has been demolished by Judy Epstein.”