Spring Cleaning

Spring is just around the corner and not a minute too soon.

I, for one, am tired of winter as I usually am long about the first of January.  Why I don't move to Florida is beyond me...

I was going through some things in my garage the other day trying to sort through the mess that has accumulated.

A collection of odds and ends.  Old magazines, gas cans, pieces of wood, bicycles, lawn chairs, tools.

All sorts of stuff and a lot of things I use all of the time.  But there are also a lot of things I never use at all that I just can't seem to part with.

Most of the latter items pertain to my father, things of his that I still have. My garage and attic and basement are full of the vestiges of his life.

Old files, jars of screws, garden tools (even though he was a reluctant gardener content to mow the lawn and plant a random tree here or there at my mother's behest, she who was also an even more reluctant gardener than my father...which makes it even funnier that I love gardening...) pieces of lumber.

Every so often I will use one of my father's things and it always gives me pleasure and a bit of sorrow at the same time.  I really miss him, even now, 34 years since his death.  He was a wonderful man and I loved him very much.

But when I use something that he used I think of the fact that whatever it might be, it is, and never will be, a replacement for the man himself.

I will find a scrap of wood and go to throw it out and find that I can't.  I inevitably put it back in its' place and justify my action by telling myself that I might need it some day.  I am rather handy so the notion that a scrap of wood could be used to make or fix something is not so far fetched.

But the truth is that I am incapable of throwing the thing out because it has a connection to my father.  I can't do it with my mother's things either.  I can't even toss things that belonged to my elder sister who died, tragically at 6, two years before I was born.

"Maybe I'll need this", I tell myself.  "I might want to use this thing one day or give it to my daughter."

No, I don't and no, I won't and my daughter, bless her heart, couldn't care less.  She never knew her grandfather or her aunt and only knew her grandmother for a short while before my mother took ill and died.

But there's hope.  There's a bit of light at the end of the Nostalgia Tunnel.

I am slowly, torturously, beginning to throw stuff out.  Little by ever so little I am weaning myself of the piles and piles of crap that litters my world.

Partly it's out of sheer necessity and part of it is out of a recent epiphanous experience.  I realized, however belatedly, that the stuff of my past, of my family, is only a material representation of the experience to which it's related or the person to whom it belonged.

That scrap of wood is not my father any more than the bookmark is my mother or the doll house is my sister.

Those people are in my heart and imagination.  I am of them and because of them and they are, and always will be, a part of me.

And my daughter and our collective family history.

Someday soon I hope to be relieved of almost all of the junk that is strewn from one end of my house to the other.

I'll keep the important things.  My father's wristwatch and my mother's bracelets.  I'll keep my sister's dollhouse too even though no one around here plays with dolls anymore.

I'll even keep the sled I had when I was a little boy.  Maybe my daughter will have a child who will want to use it.

Too bad I may not be around to show him how to use it.  It's the kind made of wood with the steel runners and the handle that you grab with both hands to direct the runners as you lie down and hurtle along the snow covered hill...on the way to the kitchen and a cup of hot chocolate and a cookie and a fireplace burning bright and warm to sit in front of to dry your socks and feel all cozy.

In your dreams my friend.  Only in your dreams...