DECEMBER 16, TUESDAY

CLEARING MY STORAGE LOCKER

Today the door on my storage locker in Swannanoa which had been closed for months because the springs on the door were broken, was finally pried open and Susie and I took both our cars to haul away as much as could carry so there would be room to fix the doors.

My locker is almost the story of America. We accumulate too much stuff to fit into our houses. When we shift from one house to another our stuff won’t fit, so we store it temporarily, until we can figure out what to do with it.

In my case I rented a locker when my family moved from a larger house on the Warren Wilson campus to a smaller house at 140 College View Drive. The stuff I stored temporarily for 35 years with more stuff being added when we cleared my mother’s locker and then more stuff as we continued to accumulate has there until now. It was a completely nutty way of dealing with surplus, and as the years went by and the money I put into rental at $65 a month surpassed and then doubled and tripled, and more, the value of the things we were storing and as dust blew in under the door and covered everything I knew I was nuts. Not knowing how to cure myself I put it out of my mind.

Finally the door froze up and I couldn’t even see what I was hoarding. So it was a great relief to get into the locker again, first to see what was there and secondly to start removing it with most of the bigger things going to the Restore or Goodwill thrift stores and the decayed things into the trash and the books to Jamie for his second hand bookstore, and, yes, you guessed it, a few nicer things for which I don’t have room into my new storage area. I don’t learn.

But also, under the dust and the junk were some things which I was delighted to find and which were worth saving all these years, things that are going into my new apartment or into Susie’s collection of materials in her studio in Marshall. The greatest prize of all is an original Eames molded plywood chair which my mother had bought at a yard sale 70 years ago which needs to be glued together. There were also rugs and beautiful Indian objects that I was delighted to rediscover. It was a good day.