We are deep into a project to get rid of much of the stuff that we have collected over our lives.
I once read a book, Boxes of our Lives, which talked about the different stages of life. We are definitely at a different stage, but I think closets are more appropriate description of life than boxes.
I can think of a lot of closets that have meant a lot to me during my life. So far I have been responsible for cleaning them all out myself. It is great that for the last thirty-seven years that I have had a partner by my side when it was time to head to a new closet.
Lewisville, NC was my home before I became a teenager and went off to military school. We had a nice house on Styers Street, and my mom ran a beauty shop out of an attached room. My favorite closet there was in a hallway. I kept my tools and fishing gear in the closet. When we moved to Mount Airy in 1963 to live with my dad, I got a bigger room with a large closet that even had drawers.
However, I did not get to enjoy that closet much since that was the year that I went off to military school. Of course I had a closet there, and each year you had to empty it out. By the time I was a senior, I think we had to get a small U-haul to get my stuff home. Some of it went in the Mount Airy closet, and some made its way to the attic there where it would wait years for me to come back.
Once you have gone away to school, it is really hard to come back. I was a typical teenager, and I wanted to get far away from home. I ended up in college in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I actually drove myself to college which was not that unusual back in the sixties. You did not go to college with a lot stuff. I had a typewriter, clothes, and some records. I eventually bought a stereo and with my roommates we got a couple of chairs and some lamps. Our prize was the refrigerator for storing our beer.
Each summer the college stuff that would not fit in the car would be stored. In the fall it would be retrieved. My last year in college, I did not go home. I emptied my closet in Currier House and headed to Ste. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia where I had bought an old house and 140 acres on the shores of the Bay of Fundy. We gutted that house, but we did not build closets, but there still was plenty of room to store stuff.
About three years after moving there, my wife, Glenda and I bought a farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. It was a great house and had lots of closets. We were there for ten years and had up to 200 head of cattle. All three of our children were born in New Brunswick. In New Brunswick, my closet underwent a transformation. There I went from wearing overalls to business suits.
After almost ten years, we got out of the cattle business, and eventually I went to work for Apple Computer which required us moving to Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was our first experience at living in the suburbs. I had two favorite closets there, one was a long, open one in a hallway that went from the garage to the kitchen. It was a great place for hanging our coats and putting our shoes. This was the first new house that we had ever owned so it was a treat. The second closet was in my office in downtown Halifax. Eventually I ended up covering four provinces by myself for Apple. Apple used to ship me so much literature that without my trusty closet, my office would have disappeared in boxes.
Halifax was a wonderful city with a beautiful harbor, lots of history, fantastic restaurants, and great street vendors in the summertime. Even more of treat was the warmth of Halifax in the winter compared to northern New Brunswick. You could get by in winter in Halifax with just sneakers. Boots were definitely required in New Brunswick. It was a liberating experience not have a closet full of boots.
We were only in Halifax for three years before the opportunity to move back to the states happened. We cleaned out the closets once again and headed down the coast. We moved to Columbia, Maryland, and it was a tough move for us. We had come from the laid back world of Canada into one of the most type "A" areas on the east coast half way between Baltimore and Washington. The traffic was unbelievable, and almost all the kids in the neighborhood went to private schools.
We only lasted two years in Columbia, and I hardly remember the closets there except for one where I stored all my work materials. We were all glad to move to the home on the side of mountain in Roanoke in the fall of 1989.
It is those closets that we are working on now in 2010. Those closets have been filled with not only raising three kids, but with carloads of things from Mount Airy. We ended up owning the ancestral home for a while, and whatever closets that I did not clean out when I went off to Canada were waiting for me. On top of that my wife's parents passed on and some more closets came to live with us.
Today we were working on the closet in my office. I had tax returns from the seventies. Business plans from the eighties and nineties, and every sort of memory that could be imagined.
My wife has a theory that there should be a sign over the main door to the house. "Be careful what you bring in here, someday you will have to carry it out."
It's scary how much stuff you can accumulate if you have lots of room. However, we are making progress. A couple of weeks ago, we took a SUV load of canning jars to some relatives who were happy to have them. We have cleaned out all the spare electronic parts that my son accumulated as a computer repair technician when he was in college. One by one the closets are getting emptied.
Today we were working to get together all the old documents that we want shredded. Tomorrow a lot of the suits that came down from Canada will go to Goodwill.
Our lives are changing and the closets that we need are going to be smaller. I am hoping to give up the snow shovels. Now instead of making it through winter in sneakers, I do pretty well in sandals and crocs.
Tomorrow, I will check a couple of old computers for digital memories before taking them to recycling.
In the end, I am glad we are doing this instead of leaving it to our kids to do. There is something satisfying about having your closets in order.
