Only in America do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in
the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage.
Only in America do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage.
“I feel like I live in a storage area,” my mother used to complain about my father’s accumulation of books, hose attachments, fan belt lubricants and hydraulic floor jacks. There were hammers in the house and dishes in the garage. At night, she dreamed elaborate fantasies of our home suddenly becoming connected to another house in the neighborhood and doubling in size.
I grew up in a layered home, in which new discoveries could be constantly made. The current strata of my childhood home includes a more modern outer layer of accumulation, followed by a 38-year-old layer of boxes from 1970, when my grandmother died, and behind that, well, we’re talking early 1900s strata back into Victorian times. This fostered my love of finding things years later and studying them, kind of like a home archeologist.
My mom was throwing out a box of magazines as she went through my dad’s things after he died. I grabbed the box back out of the trash and found a stock certificate hidden between the pages of an old Motor Trend magazine! That only reinforced my reluctance to throw things out – I might find treasure. To help me deal with this, I purchased a self-help book I have every intention of reading called, “Let Go of Clutter,” by Harriet Schechter, who is known as “the miracle worker.” It is on my kitchen table … somewhere.
The upside to all this was that I grew up with an appreciation of my family’s roots, of history come to life, of the exquisite craftsmanship of bygone eras, and a knowledge of how my ancestors lived that one cannot glean from any textbook. There is no way to measure the value of the handmade Valentine’s Day cards my great-grandmother and my grandmother created for each other, or the doodles my grandfather made in love letters while courting my grandmother in 1929.
Nothing can equal the tingle up my spine the day I found the farewell letter written from Sweden on April 23, 1880, when my Swedish great great grandfather, Nils Peterson, said good-bye to his 16-year-old son Oscar for the last time as he boarded a ship bound for America. If my parents (and grandparents) had not been packrats, my life would not have been so enriched.
“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk,” Thomas Edison said. Of course, there comes a time when we must part with certain objects in order to make room for the treasures we love most.
We hoarders have a difficult time with this because everything seems so important. I have to sit and make hundreds of decisions to clear just one pile of clutter – and it’s so hard.
Everything has a memory attached to it, or it’s something I have plans for in the future. The problem is how will I be able to find anything in the future when I want to do something with it?
Why am I telling you all this? Because this Saturday there is a sale that will include many artifacts excavated from my garage. And not just mine, but many others are participating in this opportunity to start the new year encumbered with less junk (I mean valuables!). The Methodist women of Gilroy are holding a group sale called “Granny’s Attic” to repaint and recarpet the church social hall, which serves as a meeting place for many community groups.
Come shop at the United Methodist Church benefit on the corner of Fourth and Church Streets tomorrow, Saturday Feb. 2, from 8:30 a.m. until the great bargains run out.
