I’ve written before about my efforts on de-cluttering. We have a large house, with a lot of storage space. When we moved here from our less-large house (I won’t say smaller; it was, but it wasn’t exactly small), we made no effort to sort through stuff. We had no space to lay things out. So everything went in truck, car, and trailer. There it remained for the last 18 years.
From time to time I organized things or made decisions on what to throw out. When my mother-in-law moved in with us in 2015, we suddenly had a room of extra furniture. I moved that into her room, moved the furniture that had been in there to the basement, and found a place for it. But the storeroom was an absolute mess. I bought one more utility shelf unit and filled it. That let me see what we had. Clogging up the room was an old computer desk, both lower and upper units. It had been water damaged in transit back in 1996. We used it while our children lived with us, but with them gone, why were we keeping it? It wasn’t even worth giving away. I managed to haul it out the back and up to the street and arranged for the trash company to get it. And, thus, my first de-cluttering happened.
Somewhere around that same year, 2015, I re-found some old audio recordings on vinyl records. They had come from my dad’s house, and turned out to be songs recorded by Uncle Frank Reed, who married my father’s sister. He sang semi-professionally in his youth. These came to us from cleaning out Dad’s house in 1998, went into the crammed garage, got moved to the new house in 2002, and sat somewhere in the storeroom. In the 2015 clean-up I found them and put them on a shelf, lying horizontally and properly supported on the bottom, as recommended for vinyl. They were in a place where I knew I would remember where they were.
Over the next couple of years I began going through photographs and sent some to Frank Reed’s grandson, Frank Reed 3rd, in New Jersey. Frank was close to his grandfather. It occurred to me that he might want those recordings of his grandfather. He said yes, absolutely. So I went to the storeroom to get them and…they weren’t where I expected them to be. I looked and looked for them and they just weren’t there.
Where did they go? Over the last three years, just about every time I did any work in the storeroom, I looked for them. I decided I must have put them elsewhere. I couldn’t find them. Last Saturday, during a time of some major sorting and discarding, I looked in places where they weren’t supposed to be. Sure enough, they weren’t there. I decided I needed to just quit. Someday they would show up. Meanwhile, in every message to or phone call with Frank I assured him I hadn’t forgotten my promise to find them and send them to him.
Then, Tuesday night, I went to the basement to find a certain book that I wanted to read. It wasn’t in any of the family room bookshelves. It wasn’t on my “literary” bookshelf in the storeroom. It wasn’t in three boxes of books awaiting sorting and shelving. I knew it wasn’t in one of the 20 or 30 boxes on the utility shelves, for I bought it after those boxes were filled and placed. But, on a couple of shelves were some loose books sitting on the boxes. I didn’t think the book would be there, and it wasn’t.
But, as I picked up a couple of those loose books, to my surprise, underneath them were Uncle Frank’s recordings! Exactly where I had put them five or so years ago. Apparently, after putting the records there, I put the loose books on top of them to help keep them from buckling, or to keep them from being jostled.
I immediately snapped a picture and sent it to Frank. He was elated and wondered when they might be winging his way. I was not very specific on when I would send them. Then I remembered I would be at a UPS store the next day to have a document notarized (the bank lobbies being close for that service right now). I already had the shipping box, sent to me years ago by Frank, so I could send them the next day.
Then, I remembered the peg game that Frank’s grandfather made in his commercial machine shop in New Jersey. It was, if I remembered correctly, sitting in a file cabinet drawer. It wasn’t doing anyone any good there. I went to the file cabinet and, to my surprise, the game was exactly where I remembered. The pegs seem to have been separated. Once I find them they will go to the UPS store and wing their way to Pennsylvania.
Neither of these items are big; they don’t take up much space. I won’t be able to get rid of even one box, or off-load one shelf. But these are items my children won’t have to mess with when they clean out our house some years from now. They won’t have to wonder, “Who’s on these recordings?” or “What the heck is this metal thing?” They won’t get thrown out in the confusion of going through many things.
Instead, they will have been in my cousin’s family, giving them pleasure, remembering the grandfather and great-grandfather who was talented with a guitar and song, who made unique things in his shop, and was a mentor and friend to his progeny.
It was truly a win-win situation. Hopefully, I haven’t simply added to Frank’s clutter.
