~a column by Colleen O’Brien
At least half the boxes in the basement have traveled with me for 35 years. They were born in Jefferson, added to in San Diego, carried to Nevada, now they live in Jefferson again. In those other places I never had to look at them because they were inaccessible; here, they live in an area I use, so I am aware of them every time I do the laundry, even though I have pretended otherwise for 14 years. When I finally acknowledge them, it is with exasperation. They have a weariness about them, they seem to have settled in, sagging slightly on their pallets as if the long years of waiting weighed them down. They are obviously neglected. But unless I do something about them, they will never go away. They will be there long after I’m dust.
I’d be happy for this to happen. But, because I am on the path of what is now known as downsizing, I cannot leave them there; I have to find them another home. This time I shall liberate them. And myself.
It is more than I bargained for; or, if I’m looking for honesty, I knew exactly what to expect, which is why I put it off for decades. The boxes are full of things I have to make decisions about: Do I save the faded but still clear Gibson girl Daguerreotype with Mom’s writing on the back? “Pretty girl, unknown. But I thought you’d like the dress”; and the Edwardian gent sitting on a chair holding a derby, he also indentified on the back as unknown. “But doesn’t’ he look like Jim Clopton?” wrote Mom. Jim, my husband, died several years ago, but in the day, he agreed that the unknown fellow resembled him. Is this reason to save him? I think not. If I couldn’t save my husband, why would I save an unknown?
These two mysteries are nothing compared to other items, like my parents’ diplomas from the early 1930s. Do the museums of their respective towns want them? Do my children want them? I do not. I do not even want mine. Old diplomas are a dime a dozen out there in Antiqueland.
I so far have gone through what seems like more photos than I could have taken, ever — 360 from a trip to the UK. I looked at them in 1984, when we returned, and I have looked at them now. My grandson, who happened to be trapped in the basement with me to go through boxes, looked at one and said, “Hey, nice tree growing out of Grampa’s head.” I threw them all away. The next 30 dozen were of a trip I took to Russia. These were even less intriguing — almost all of buildings, and you know how ugly Russian buildings are; plus people and scenery too far away to discern who or what they might have been. Trash.
This felt so right, the sane way to take care of a bunch of old photos with no value as fact or art. When I tell people what I’ve been able to jettison, they look at me in horror. “You can’t just throw them away!” they say. I ask, “Do you want them?” They walk away. This is to me a revealing behavior: no one wants to look at what’s in the boxes in the basement.
A few things seem savable to me — the yearly photos of my daughter’s progression through school. I send them off to her. She responds: “Why did you think I would ever want to look at these again, Mom?” She throws them away, a girl after my own heart. Like me, she knows there are too many photos in the world.
The advice I’ve been given by several people on how to clean out basement boxes is this: three boxes; one for indecision, one for saving, one for tossing. I’m skipping the indecision box and tossing the majority, saving a few things for the children, to toss. I thought this brutality to history would involve more guilt. What it actually engenders is lightness of being. If I have to go through a box to see what I have, I didn’t really have it in the first place, did I? I’ve thought this of my entire basement repository for many years — if I didn’t know something was there, it wasn’t.
If I toss out the Antiques Road Show find of the century, well, I’ll never know that, either, will I? The dilemma is not in choosing life or death for each item; the dilemma is in that first decision to look at all.
As my sis once said, “We all lead such tiny lives.” I agree. And those family members who are interested in mine know all worth knowing already — one more box of photos and junk will not reveal much. And soon, within a couple of generations, I will really be gone, no one who knew me able to pass on who I was other than a pic or two. And really, the way I kept track of photos, I might wind up as one of the “Unknown,” so why save in the first place?
This passing into oblivion is as it must be, for if all of us through the centuries had saved all of our junk, well, things would soon start falling off the world. Shortly, I will be tossing out boxes without a thought about what’s inside and who gets what. There are so many paths to so many kinds of freedom, the basement cleansing just one of them.
