Closet Cleaning

Now that I’m done with my job and am on spring break I have been trying to keep myself busy. At the moment I am listening to Yonder Mountain String Band and relearning to type, something I have to do every time I start a new paper or post. I’m trying to write this post from the recliner in the living room, and it is proving to be difficult because the arms of the chair are raising my own arms up and preventing the usual downward momentum I get at a desk. I may have to move, but the comfort of the recliner is causing me to stay put for the moment.

About a week ago I decided, now that I have more free time, to get around to some pressing domestic issues that foreign engagements have caused me to neglect. When I really got the chance to take in all of the projects around the house that are screaming for attention I was very tempted to set up camp on the couch and conduct a Food Network marathon over the week. But I gave myself a pep talk, and half a pot of strong coffee, and got down to it. I tried to look at it as a quest, and in a way it was, because the first task was to clean up the upstairs closet with the goal of finding a complete set of James Fennimore Cooper that I inherited from my grandmother. I had boxed these up and put them into storage during an anti-old-stuff campaign a couple of years back.

But I knew that in our house, the box of books wouldn’t just be sitting conveniently inside the closet door. It’s probable that I hadn’t opened the closet door in about a year, or if I had I just shut my eyes and threw in an old artifact that I was tired of having in our living space. As I looked at the tangled mass of dysfunctional Christmas lights, window fans, air conditioners, bagged up clothes meant to go the Goodwill, and box upon box of books, I sighed and tried to find a starting point.

The first order of business was to remove the bean-bag chair. Along with many books, I also inherited this huge white bean-bag from my grandmother, or I didn’t really inherit it, it just fell to me when it lost its novelty for everyone else in my family. I used to play video games in it but after a while the disdainful looks it received from Margaret caused me to shove it in the closet. Now it needed to be pulled out before any real headway could be made, so I grabbed it up and started pulling it through door, but, it wouldn’t fit! The desire to get the chair through the door was receiving heavy competition from the wonderment over how I had gotten it there in the first place. Meanwhile, as I tugged and pulled and tried to reposition it, the chair was hemorrhaging tiny white foam balls. They were going everywhere. Was this how the entire project was going to go?

I decided to get back to the bean-bag chair later. I put it in corner, out of the way for the most part, and started to pull things out of the closet. After about ten minutes the guest bedroom was full and the closet's contents were strewn (I love that word) out into the hall, little white foam balls following behind like snow flurries. The closet still looked full.

Our house is a two-story bungalow with a severely sloped roof, and this particular closet contains the largest degree of slope in its design. I’m six foot one, and can walk into the closet standing upright, but any forward movement has to be incrementally achieved with a progressively back-straining stoop. I’ve heard all of my life that you must lift heavy objects with your knees (which is the most unnatural thing to try to do) and I believe this is what I was attempting when I slammed my head into the ceiling—the first time.

I won’t go into the language or the tone of my invective; I’ll just say that it was enough to wake Margaret up.

Margaret has about three things she says when she first wakes up. The first one is invariably “What time is it?” We have a clock radio with the biggest digital readout I could find, but still, she wants to hear it from me. The next one is, “Where are you going?” although I’m usually not going anywhere except downstairs, she seems to believe, in her half-awake state, that I’m going on a trans-Atlantic journey or something. The final thing she says is, “did you get me a paper?” Sometimes I can answer this in the affirmative.

On this morning it was “What the hell is going on?” or “What the hell are you doing?” or “Oh my God, you aren’t doing that now are you?” or something to that effect. She had already tripped over a bag of Goodwill clothes on her way to the bathroom, and all of the usual wake-up niceties were dispensed with as she took in the debris of my project.

She could probably tell that I had bitten off more than I could chew, so she gave me some advice that I immediately dismissed, she told me to take it slowly and take one box at a time; all of the boxes and items were causing me to feel overwhelmed. She was right, but in my urgency to build Rome before 11:30am I had convinced myself that everything had to happen quickly, so that I could continue on to the next project. We tend to forget sometimes that home ownership is a long haul, and as opposed to having the day neatly wrapped up by rush hour (as we do in the working world) the household projects often take longer. As long as we don’t act as if the King of Siam were coming over to inspect our use of closet space (or worse, my mother) we can take a more relaxed approach to the task.

As Margaret made her way toward work, her advice started to sink in. I had located the books I was looking for, piled the Goodwill items into my truck, arranged the boxes in a way that you could find things in the closet, and swept up most of the little white “beans” off the floor of the closet, guest bedroom and hall.

While I was in the far reaches of the closet, I came across a box of old photographs that had somehow never made it into albums. There were literally hundreds of photographs going back to Africa and through our trips to Scotland. There were pictures of my friends lined up behind all of our guitars, and of the construction site in Costa Rica, of old friends and pets, and our house before we had it painted, and Margaret and I taking a walk in Yadkin County. I abandoned the closet for about half an hour as I let these images transport me around my recall, marveling at how skinny I once was and how transient life used to be. I shook off (for the most part) initial vestiges of melancholia and steeled myself for the home stretch, placing the photos, within easy reach, inside the closet door.

I’ve moved on to other projects now. In the hopes of having a “Wall of Books” in my office I have been clearing the way for a new bookshelf that I will get this weekend. The Cooper collection will go in it, and as I begin to envision this I’m trying to remember exactly where in the closet I put them. Another excavation might be necessary.

And, still, I just can’t figure out how in the hell I got that bean-bag chair in that closet.