Even before we were stuck at home, My family has been cleaning up and cleaning out. It’s like the first peeks of springtime sun spurred us to think about what we don’t need. We started thinking about what is salable in a rummage sale, something that we’ve been talking about doing since we first moved into this house ten years ago and we have finally gotten organized enough to try.
Our pile isn’t quite this big, but it’s not finished yet! Photo by Patrick Cristobal on Pexels.com
So we started to look at what we have stashed in the shelves in the basement that we haven’t taken out in years. I’ve been ‘curating’ my closet for a while, feeling like there are too many clothes that I was saving for a different size or a different occasion. After once through the kids’ clothes, we had another two boxes of clothes to try to sell. We had a good collection of things piling up in the garage that we knew we weren’t going to need any longer — toys, clothes, appliances, and random electronics.
And then the world stood still. We’re not sure when or if we can have a rummage sale. We’re not even sure if it will be safe to do when they tell us it’s legal to have a sale.
So now we have piles of stuff right behind the garage door, and more that we have been meaning to haul out there. We have a dining room table that we’d like to remove and replace, as soon as we can unbury it from the detritus of everyday kitchen. But the energy and push to get everything together and ready to sell has disappeared. Without a date and the certainty that we will be holding a sale, our focus has been allowed to slip to other things.
If you check out social media, however, it is full of pictures of newly cleaned spaces. People who are home more now than they ever have been are finding the time to bless their environment. Since they’re home staring at it, they can’t ignore the pile of random ____ in the craft room that they’d intended to sort through two years ago and then look around to see that if they just clear out that cabinet, maybe the stamp stuff would fit in there and be easier to organize and then the shelf the stamp stuff was on is clear and…
These pictures, my own garage, and my more-spacious closet have all gotten me thinking. Where does all of this stuff come from? I must have wanted/needed it at some point. I acquired it however long ago for a reason and I kept it because…?
Not even close to as many as I have…
One point that this is particularly noticeable is my storage container cupboard in my kitchen. I have a selection of the glass tubs with the silicon lids that were in vogue for a while and are still an eco-friendly food storage solution. Somehow, I don’t have enough of them in a particular size, however, because I still end up reaching for the plastic containers that I have stashed everywhere in there.
That’s what illustrates my point. We live in a small, rural area, so the recycling plant will literally only take two numbers and everything else gets thrown away. As a result, I tend to save those containers that would be thrown away (I’m not usually conscious enough to not buy the food that come in THOSE containers so I have fewer to get rid of), and as a result of THAT, I have… billions. I have yogurt containers. I have sour cream containers. I have cottage cheese containers. I have lunch-meat boxes. I have empty salsa jars (another thing our plant won’t recycle). The sheer number of containers is overwhelming. Especially for my cupboard.
Where did this propensity to save come from?
Okay, my mother has been spending the last few years obsessed with ‘tiny house’ and ‘minimalist’ YouTubers. She also always has a new box of things to bring me every week that she’s clearing out and I can, “feel free to give away” if it’s something I can’t use. I can pretty clearly identify where in my life the thought, “But you might need that someday” comes from.
Beautiful clothes, though! From needpix.com
But as a society, where did this idea come from? The current crisis that we’re all living through is reminding us of the last time a pandemic shut down our society, and then lead into The Great Depression when so many people didn’t have and couldn’t get what they needed. We’re focused on the, “Roaring 20’s” and the excesses of the time period that lead so many to go the other way, becoming puritain in every way that they could control. Prohibition was a reaction to the results of the elite having too much and the lower classes having too little. So many people were trying to push forward and bring more equality to our world, but there were just as many people pushing back and trying to maintain the status quo.
I know that voice. I can hear the voice being echoed through the generations, my great-grandma to my young grandma, my grandma to my young mother, and I remember hearing my mother when I was young. “Don’t throw that away, you can use it again if you just wash it. You know how many of those are still in the landfill? Do you know how long those take to break down?”
We’re all a product of our Grandmother’s generation. It’s easy to see that we are the products of our generation. It’s easy to see the influence of our parent’s generation. But it is so often difficult to sort out the products of those generations so long ago that we barely knew the people who lived them. They peek out of our psyche in so many quiet ways that don’t call for a lot of analysis. They’re part of ‘just what we’ve always done’ or seen as tradition by the time we get them.
And while some of them are beautiful place settings for all of the family meals or a talent for fibercrafting, some of them are an overfilled storage container and holding onto the clothes that we don’t wear because, “Well, maybe this summer…”
What’s your ‘overfilled storage container’ project? Who can you trace it to? Comment below.
Now excuse me while I go sort plasticware.
Massive free Articulation 
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