Clearing Out

I just spent two solid days in a whirlwind-tour of housecleaning—organizing, clearing out, dusting, vacuuming cat-hair… There are eight full garbage-bags in my car, waiting to go to Goodwill, and I took as many to the dumpster. I went through closets, shelves, drawers. I cleared off horizontal surfaces. I tornadoed through the various repository-areas where things tend to pile up when we put things down and don’t return to put them away somewhere. I got rid of the size-large shirts that now hang on me unflatteringly, and hung up the new size-medium shirts. (Now I just have to tackle the last 15 pounds to get me out of the “overweight” category altogether.) I didn’t get on the treadmill during those two days, but I worked up a solid sweat with housecleaning—something that (I can’t stress this enough) could very seldom be said of me! There are still areas of the house that I haven’t tackled (the pantry closet, the shelving in the laundry-room, the dresser-drawers by the front door), mostly because those are full of things my husband would have to make decisions about—tools and kitchen things—so I’ll have to recruit his help to really finish the job. So far he has bemusedly kept out of the way as I sweated my way through the house. (“Mommy’s in Zoom Mode,” he confided to the cats.)

It’s a curious phenomenon, how our stuff seems to multiply and expand to fill whatever space there is to fill. It seems to be true regardless of what type or size of space you’re talking about. Take purses, for example—if I get a bigger purse so I can have one that’s less crowded, I soon find myself carrying more stuff in the bigger purse. It’s the same thing with a house.

When Jon and I married, he had been living with another bachelor-brother, and I had been living in an apartment where the lease was about to run out. We house-shopped for a bit, but couldn’t find the right type of house in the right type of area—in addition to which, we were agreed that we wanted to get out of Boise and closer to the ocean within a few years… So we bought a 40-foot RV—a toy-hauler with a “garage” section—and moved into that, in an RV park, when we got married. Both of us sold our furniture and downsized, and when we moved into the RV without even a storage unit, everything we owned was contained in that fifth wheel. That made it easy, when we were offered this job managing an RV park in eastern Oregon, to pull up stakes and just drive our home over the mountains to Pendleton. Fourteen days after being offered the job, we were Pendleton residents. (It could have been even quicker, but we both gave two weeks’ notice at our jobs.) We simply pulled our motorcycles into the garage-section and hooked up the truck!

I’ve always hated moving—or at any rate, the packing and unpacking—and I’d moved far too many times in the decade before our marriage, so I found this move delightful, by contrast! We had a dilemma, though: the job came with a house, and the question was whether we would actually move into it. We were on wheels on purpose, after all.

It was a staffing question that decided us. We’d offered a housekeeping job to the gal who’d been doing park-housekeeping in Boise. She’d just lost her husband, and didn’t have friends or family in Boise, and she was interested in the job. But her RV was too old—we didn’t want it in the park, and it probably wouldn’t have made it over the mountains in any case. So we ended up offering her our RV as a rental, and we moved into the house.

We bought a bedroom set from the park, and accepted a surplus couch and dining room chairs from my mother. We found a dining room table and my roll-top oak desk at Salvation Army, and bought a desk chair and an armchair from park residents. Pretty quickly we were furnished—and one way and another, we began to fill the space. Books. Kitchen gadgets. Camping gear. Sewing fabric and art supplies and garden tools and canning equipment. We had room for more clothes, more hobbies, more tools. It wasn’t that long before the closets and shelves all had things in them.

Well, the closets and shelves are less cluttered now. I even have empty shelves and drawers in the living room and guest room. Given how psychologically satisfying it is to have things uncluttered, it’s ironic how things seem to build up and accumulate. I suppose it’s a matter of not having the mental “brakes” on, when it comes to buying something. When we lived in the RV, I was all too aware that any new item I might buy would have no place to GO. I’m not a crazy shopper, and I’m finance-conscious, but I no longer have to be space-conscious; I no longer pause and ask myself where I would put something that’s in my Amazon cart.. Or what I’ll get rid of to make room for it.

Still, I’ve just done a bunch of get-rid-of-ing—and it’s not in preparation for shopping.

Among the things that I consolidated are all of our things for diving and snorkeling and water-ing. On our Hawai’i trip the wheels broke on a suitcase and the zipper threatened to break on a duffel, so when we got home I bought us a pair of hard-shell suitcases, lightweight and fairly spacious, with glidey wheels. They’ve been standing in our living room for a month—one impetus for the clearing-out project. Now they have a closet-half to themselves, and one of them is neatly packed with all of our snorkel gear, beach towels, water shoes, rash guards… oh, and the other thing we bought after coming home from that trip: an underwater Go-Pro-type camera. I was frustrated by my phone’s inability to focus well when I had the waterproof pouch on it, and after the demise of my iPhone 16 on a dive, my phone is no longer allowed to go skinny-dipping. We’ll see how the photo quality is with this one.

Now we just need another warm-water vacation to test out the camera—and for that matter, the suitcases.

We have a tenth anniversary coming up next month… Hmm.