I was cleaning out closets and drawers, in search of items for this weekend’s Grand & Glorious Garage Sale. Allie’s nursery school needed donations, and I was sure I could come up with plenty of things we no longer needed and didn’t want.
Everyone has the things they have to save. Knickknacks, fix-it projects, collections; clothes they might wear, dusty CDs or record albums saved for one song, books they loved.
My husband and I are not knickknack people. We share a small house and a low tolerance for clutter. We don’t collect anything or enjoy fixer-uppers; we’ve never bought anything on eBay.
But I have a few boxes. Childhood things, letters and cards, wedding mementos, ticket stubs and playbills and programs, small objects that make up a life.
Allie was excited to help with the cleaning project. We started with the toy box in the family room, and I was thrilled when she decided she no longer wanted the orange Boohbah that dances and makes strange sounds when you squeeze its hand or poke its foot.
But then she started taking things out of the garage sale box faster than I could put them in; at one point, she spirited a paperback copy of "Stellaluna" upstairs to her room, despite my repeated reassurances that we had two identical copies, and the other one was tucked securely on her bookshelf.
In her bedroom, she tore through the bags and boxes I’d taken out of her closet until the floor was strewn with piles of toys and clothes. Then she sat in the middle of the room and examined the items in her wake.
Some things were easy to give away: stranger-clothes with the tags still on, too small or too frilly or too scratchy; never worn, no memories and no regrets.
Other items created a dilemma: to keep or not to keep? Sometimes, it was a practical issue: Would Allie really use the hot-pink cowboy hat from big-sister Abby’s second-grade oral report on Madonna? What about the old shinguards and soccer cleats?
Eventually, Allie lost interest in the mess and went downstairs to play.
Knowing my kid-free time would be short, I quickly picked up piles and started sorting into empty boxes: yes, no, maybe.
I slowed down when I got to the box of baby things. Crib sheets and tiny washcloths, two pairs of scuffed shoes, side-by-side, in a Stride Rite box; two tiny pink-and-blue-striped hospital hats.
I started seeing snapshots. Abby in her yellow-and-white going-home-from-the-hospital outfit, her hands hidden inside the floppy arms, the booties nearly falling off her feet; Allie scooting across the floor in purple corduroy overalls, fast, one leg moving rhythmically back and forth like some sort of mechanical device, the other dragging behind.
What to do with things I will never use again but can’t bear to throw out or give away? I held a white burp cloth embroidered with "I Love Daddy" in blue letters to my face and could swear there was still a hint of baby smell.
By bedtime, I had five boxes and three bags of stuff for the sale, one organized closet and 18 items with which I simply could not part. I stowed them away in a plastic zippered bag from Allie’s crib bedding set. They will be safe there until I find the right box to keep them in.
The next morning, Allie didn’t come out of her room right away. I could hear her puttering around in there, and after a while she clumped out in Barbie snow boots, three sizes too big, and asked me to come into her room to watch her play dress-up.
Sipping coffee on her bed, I watched as she spotted the hot-pink hat in the closet and put it on. "I’m a cowboy," she declared, grinning and tilting her head in a two-second pose, then bending over to adjust her boots.
"Gotta go save a cat!" she said, and she tramped out the door.
Alone again in her room, I thought about kindergarten and middle school, both coming too fast, and all the boxes I will someday add to my collection.
___
Lisa Miller is a freelance writer who lives in Oneonta. She can be reached at lisamiller44@hotmail.com.
Columns
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Book-banning has a tendency to backfire
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Book-banning has a tendency to backfire
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- Mark Simonson
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Don't play around with snappers
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Justice Dept., IRS abuses worth screaming about
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Continued ... - THIS WEEK'S POLL
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Justice Dept., IRS abuses worth screaming about
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Romney focuses on self; Obama emphasizes unity
Mitt Romney criticizes President Obama for saying a person's success is rooted in his community, and is not all his alone. Romney belittles this with his belief in individual initiative. He is better at the put-down than the push-up.
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Romney shows little regard for common man
The Republicans in Congress have voted over and over, 33 times, redundantly and uselessly, to rescind what they call Obamacare.
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Scouts' gay ban creates problem where none exists
The Boy Scouts of America's "emphatic reaffirmation" of its vow to exclude any and all homosexuals from its hallowed ranks is ill-considered and pathetic, especially in view of its having reviewed the matter for two years.
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Schreibman tops Chris Gibson on women's issues
