Our house is full.
I came to this revelation in that post-Christmas fit of ambition I always get after the wreath is put away and the tree is thrown away and I decide to get organized for the New Year.
It started when I decided to put away the empty shoebox that had, been sitting on the coffee table since Christmas morning, blocking the TV. The box had, until recently, held a new pair of running shoes but I decided to keep the box because they’re good for storing stuff.
Now, I admit I go through running shoes pretty quickly, and the nature of a running shoe is that even when they are no longer good for running, they are perfectly acceptable for other pedestrian uses, such as going to the mall or working in the yard. But I hate the mall and generally work in the yard barefoot, so I have thousands of old running shoes in the closet, and hundreds of empty shoeboxes.
I decided to put the shoebox in the hall closet, but that closet has thousands of record albums in it. What do you with the albums you have been buying since middle school? We don’t even own a turntable anymore but we can’t bring ourselves to throw the records away so there they sit.
Ditto the compact discs. My partner and I stopped buying CDs when we got our I-pods, but we can’t quite throw the CDs away, so they sit in the closet, right across from the videotapes which we also keep, even though we no longer have a VCR. All the DVDs are there too, obsolete since we get movies on demand through Comcast.
The meager bit of space in the hall closet not taken up by albums, videos, CDs and DVDs is occupied by Christmas decorations and, quite honestly, the main reason we still have a live tree each year is because we have no place to store a fake one. My shoebox and I moved on.
There was no room in the master bedroom closet, which is filled with clothes and running shoes and suitcases and shoeboxes containing stuff, which I mean to organize eventually. The guest room closet is filled with sheets and towels and blankets since our old house was built without a linen closet, which always makes me wonder what came first: linen closets or “Bed, Bath & Beyond?” Certainly one could not survive without the other.
There was no room for the shoebox under the bed, which is where we store winter clothes, yearbooks, college diplomas and other documents that we don’t use but can’t be thrown away. Under the bed is also where the cats live, and they get testy if we crowd them out.
There was certainly no room for my shoebox in the laundry room, which is filled with the clothes that don’t fit under the bed, as well as 50-pound bags of dog food, cat food and kitty litter. The laundry room is also filled with millions of magazines that we mean to read eventually, but until then they sit on top of the washer, and must be put on the dining room table on laundry day. No room for a shoebox there.
Our house has only 2 bedrooms so I was running out of space. Ic ould not put the shoebox in the oven, which we never use, because it is filled with platters and bowls and serving pieces that don’t fit in the cupboards. I could not put the shoebox in the garage, which is filled with hurricane shutters, pool vacuums, rafts, rakes, bicycles, shovels, and, in cold weather, squirrels, not to mention two cars.
I sighed. The nature of modern life is that we accumulate stuff faster than we can use it, break it, or donate it. Exhausted, I put the shoebox back on the coffee table and moved the TV. It’s easier this way.
O