Going, going, gone: fondue pot circa 1964
Women, I think, are particularly prone to cleaning binges. Periodically we feel possessed by an urge to sort, separate and toss. The urge is preceded by the accumulation of a critical mass, then the tipping point, the explosion and the purge.
Last week I looked around my house, took stock of the detritus of 43 years of living and giving and getting and regifting, and decided to lighten the load. I planned a yard sale to sell the accumulated junk of the last four decades.
First we had to steel ourselves for the dangerous trip to the Netherlands. That would be our basement, which has struck fear into the heart of more than one innocent water meter reader. Think bubbling caldrons, twitching electrical cords and moldy leaks. A quick scan reveals: a Ping-Pong table weighed down with enough paper goods to supply Costco. Other samplings: 36 old vases from flowers gifted to us through the years, dozens of photo albums, vintage sheet music, tools, golf clubs, mismatched silverware, luggage from before they put wheels on the damn things, pots before Teflon, and what yard sale aficionados call “ephemera,” meaning the odd box of note cards with cover photos of Spiro Agnew or a book on the proper role of a housewife, circa 1900.
Like Christie’s, we have special collections belonging to our grown children, who consider our basement their personal repository even though they haven’t lived here for 20 years. I have Jason the lawyer’s Halloween Zorro costume, including cape and velvet fedora, circa 1979. It’s unlikely he’ll wear it to court. Jocelyn collected rocks. Just bags of rocks, which do make the cleanup process ever so much more challenging. I felt like one of Sholem Aleichem’s characters, rolling bags of rocks up the basement stairs.
