My wife and I have lived in our house for some 38 years. We bought it in 1969 when I moved to Washington to open a government relations office for the American College of Radiology. It was a four-bedroom, two-story house just two blocks from schools and a mile from the nearest shopping center and some 7 miles from my office in Chevy Chase.
We had not planned to stay all this time in the same house. But shortly after we settled in, housing prices began to climb in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. To borrow Alan Cranston’s phrase, we found ourselves living in a more expensive house without having to move.
Because I expected to move in a few years, I unpacked our possessions and saved most of the boxes, stashing them over the garage. I thought I would save money by not needing to buy new boxes and containers. And, as we bought record players and other electronic gadgets, I saved those boxes to repack the contents when we moved. I also saved old suitcases, no longer sturdy enough for travel but fine for packing clothes and linens. The Christmas tree ornaments also found their space above the garage.
The walls of the den sprouted bookshelves and I built crude furniture to hold the record collections and such. One corner of the basement held my workbench with the tools I inherited from my father. I saved jars of screws, nails, and bits of impedimentia to replace a broken knob or handle. The boxes of washers and caulk helped with simple plumbing and the box of electrical parts saved trips to the hardware store.
Even so, I was not keeping up. Diana had her decoupage, her stands, and lights for African violets and other small plants, the parts for furniture for the doll house never built. When she cleaned out her mother’s house, we inherited towels, linens, dishes, and enough other stuff to fill a second wall of homemade shelves. When the children went off to college, she flowed into their rooms with her sewing machine and approximately a third of a million spools of thread and bolts of cloth.
When I left the American College of Radiology a decade ago, I winnowed my files down to about 30 boxes and built other shelves in the garage to hold them. Each time I finished a book, another box crammed itself into those shelves, forcing me to consolidate and throw away older contents.
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