Small steps towards organizing (01/14/2009)

It's a January thing.

The Christmas lights are down. The wrapping paper and cardboard boxes have been hauled away from the curb.

And the urge to get things organized is almost overwhelming.

It's time to empty the junk drawer, get rid of the clothes that don't fit, and throw away those leftover love letters.

But just because the urge is there, doesn't mean it's actually going to happen. It's way too easy to get sidetracked.

At our house the plan was to empty the shelves of an old dry sink, making room for a collection of no-longer-watched videotapes. By moving the videotapes and a large collection of no-longer-listened-to vinyl record albums, we hoped to make room in cupboards beneath a built-in bookcase.

Exactly what we'll put there is a little unclear at this point, but the first step was to clear out the old dry sink, and that was the perfect chore for a cold Sunday afternoon when the Eagles and the Giants were playing in a game that held little interest.

We started with a few of boxes and a trash bag. One box would be stuff to give away. Another box would be stuff to be recycled. And the third box would be stuff to go through more carefully before pitching it.

Digging through the two lower shelves of the dry sink was an exercise in family archaeology.

Old board games and jigsaw puzzles occupied much of the space. They immediately went into the give-away box.

And some things were clearly going into the trash bag.

But the urge to purge slows down when you start encountering things with emotional value.

I came across contact sheets from photos I took of Connie's late father back about 1979. He had just finished writing a history of Illinois College, and the publisher wanted a shot for the dust jacket. In the end, they used a photo someone else had taken; but we held onto the contact sheets just the same. And we're still holding onto them.

There were a handful of stories I had written for the twins on Sunday afternoons when they accompanied me to the office, printed out on a dot matrix printer.

There were scores of snapshots, mostly duplicates of ones that were in albums but also dozens that were out of focus or under-exposed. There was a good one of me with Woody Turner about 1987 and more than a few in which I looked ridiculous.

There were two cribbage boards, though I can't remember the last time we played cribbage. (We pitched one and held onto the other in case we are snowbound and feel ourselves in a cribbage mood.)

With the pile of old photos, there was an even bigger pile of envelopes carrying negatives. I husked those like ears of corn, keeping the negatives in the plastic sleeves and tossing the paper envelopes into the recycling box.

And there were a few mysteries, things that make you scratch your head and wonder how they happened to arrive in your house: A small piece of electronic equipment that gives no clue of its original function, an autographed book from a cartoonist whose work has never appeared in The Commercial Review, a copy of a prototype edition of USA Today before it began publishing.

By the third quarter, we'd emptied the dry sink and transferred the videotapes. We'd decided to hold onto some things for the family archives. And we'd put together a good box of games and puzzles to offer to the Youth Service Bureau.

Was it a perfect January purge? We probably held onto more than we should have for purely sentimental reasons.

But the house is resting a little lighter on its foundation.[[In-content Ad]]