Re: [gardeners] OT Men's Clutter
penny x stamm (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Sat, 3 Oct 1998 22:46:58 -0400
Linda, you speak the truth.
We have a huge finished basement which kept our five children
busy many a moon ago.... There's a shuffleboard built in to the floor,
and a hundred mat-framed Great Masters pinned on the walls.
There's even a 15 x 30 room in the corner which houses the HO model
railroad we built some 40 years ago, and a parallel work shop for
Jimmie's huge tool collection. It has 150 cigar boxes, 40 coffee cans,
40 orange juice cans, and 30 Pepsi cartons, all labelled and entered
on the computer data base which hangs on the wall....
But it came to pass that daughter #1 split from her hubby some
five years ago, so where could the poor thing store all her living
and dining and bedroom furniture...? Why, in Mom's basement, of course.
Along with that came dozens of cartons of who knows what, and boxes
to the ceiling of toys from her own son's youth, saved for HIS son's
pleasure, some 15 years into the future. After all, those toys were made
with quality - out of wood, instead of plastic - and can never be
replaced.....
And from out of nowhere I see that we have a stack of 20ft lumber, two
bikes (from other daughters), an emergency lawn mower, extra lengths
of garden soakers, a cyclone spreader, several ancient computers,
3 vacuum cleaners Jim picked up at curbside, and the bi-weekly bagged
newspaper collection waiting for pick-up.
Just this very afternoon, I called #1 and read her my ultimatum: "The
time
has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things.... and all that
stuff has to be cleared out of there one, two, three, because I want to
sell
the house!" As far as I'm concerned, the inside will get spick and span
once more, and the outside will continue to bring me pleasure whether
or not a prospective buyer approves. We've been here 45 years, and it
took one devil of a lot of work to make it what it is today. Houses sell
like
hot cakes hereabouts, too -- and it's taken for granted that people will
have a lawn service. Jimmie and I are the only two die-hards, slaving
away doing the grunt work. It's been very rewarding....
Penny, NY
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