A few months ago now, my wife and I attended a lecture sponsored by our financial advisor on the subject of moving into an elderly living facility. Our advisor pumps these topics regularly, and occasionally we hear something useful. The speaker was a sales manager at a newly constructed and absurdly expensive facility. I had about turned him off when someone asked if the facility had storage rooms. “You have to sort out your things and get rid of most of them before you can move into our place,” he said with a grin. Right then, he lost me.
I started thinking about what we would have to do. Diana started the same mental list. Hers was different from mine. By the time we had driven home, we were reciting our lists and pointing the fickle finger of blame at each other. Discussions of that subject have gone on steadily, and each of us has agreed that the other has the biggest pile to discard. Mind you, after 40 years of marriage, we recognize many joint possessions: furniture, dishes, paintings on the walls, the furnace, air conditioner, hot water heater, most of the lamps (except that ugly one in the living room), almost all of the linens. But that is hardly half of what fills our house, our apartment, and our conversation about getting rid of useless items.
When we moved to Washington 40 years ago, we unpacked boxes, and I stowed them in the attic over the garage. My incorrect logic was that we probably would move in a few years, and the boxes would save us money. Gradually, the attic space acquired boxes for TV sets, hi-fis, screens replaced with storm windows, Christmas ornaments, and a dozen suitcases that would be handy for packing clothes for a move. They are all up there and waiting for just a few more years.
One wall of the garage is lined with shelves that I built to hold the boxes of paper that I have saved from my writing during the past 60 years. About 20 of the boxes were full of files from my office. Some of them contain notes from my 15 history books. A dozen boxes contain copies of the books. Others have pamphlets and brochures. Some have research materials from the studies I have conducted on pneumoconiosis and asbestosis. All of them are vital, precious, and urgent. I have begun sorting out the publications and putting them into notebooks, so that I can find anything written since 1950 on the first try. One of these days, weeks, or years, I shall sort through them and discard. But not just now.
The other part of my collection is the workbench for my tools and supplies in one corner of the basement. Hammers, saws, sanders, drills, spirit levels, boxes of nails, jars of screws, coils of wires, electric switches and junction boxes, washers and other plumbing supplies, cans of paint, sawhorses, scraps of wood, rolls of plastic, and other gadgets and bits.
There is the den, where I do my writing. There are shelves with a couple of hundred books, file drawers under the desk, the fax machine, the copier, a dozen banker boxes with source material for the four books in progress, and the stereo set with more than 500 CDs.