One of my favorite holiday stories is “Good Housekeeping,” a Bailey White public radio commentary from some years back. It’s about White’s comic struggle to clean up her elderly mother’s house for Thanksgiving, a challenge complicated by the elder White’s passion for saving everything.
Over the course of an exhausting weekend, the house slowly surrenders its strange keepsakes, which include a turtle skull, “some deadly appliances from the early days of electricity, and an old mechanical milking machine with attachments for only three teats.”
I don’t think of myself as a pack rat in the White family tradition, although hoarders rarely recognize their worst tendencies. All of this came to mind as Thanksgiving approached this year and nudged me to look around our own house with fresh eyes. Visitors were coming, and it wouldn’t do to have an avalanche when an in-law opened a broom closet — or a trip to the emergency room if a guest tripped on a stack of paperbacks on the way to the dinner table.
In advance of the holidays, my wife and I took a couple of days off to declutter.
Clearing cabinets, bookshelves and nightstands, I was struck by the odd sediment that settles within a home as the river of time flows through its rooms. I thought about White’s mother — and my mother, too, who was what you might call an accumulator. After she died in 2008, we found 32 pairs of scissors when we emptied her house.
She’d lose one pair within the tangle of her household, then buy a replacement, which would eventually sink into the multitude of her belongings and require yet another pair of scissors in its place.
Am I this bad? I hope not, although I did come across four sets of pliers in our broom closet when my wife and I were tidying things up.
A dozen rolls of Scotch tape surfaced from the dim corner of a kitchen cupboard, along with other artifacts. I found three dog brushes for our terrier, who died in 2020. It was surprising to learn that I own seven bottles of glue, nine flashlights (each one broken), a coach’s whistle, eight switch plates, nine padlocks (four with keys), three balls of twine and 14 house keys, all for property no longer in the family. Also, six rulers, two yardsticks and five power cords for phones we stopped using a decade ago.
Combing through bits of this and that, I wondered how all this stuff had crossed our threshold and staked its claim, a migration of material goods I should have noticed. Maybe it’s a reminder for me to be more fully present in my own life, an ideal that has particular appeal as the holidays arrive.
What I feel, after winnowing our rooms of what we no longer need, is abundance. In this season of gifts, I already have more than what I could ever want.
Email Danny Heitman at [email protected].
