I’m sure everyone who has ever lived in a home with a garage has faced this dilemma at one time or another. I know there are those of you whose garage always looks your living room, or at least your study. Neat, orderly, put away, arranged just so . . . and even room left over to park a car or two.
I AM NOT ONE OF THOSE!
Oh, I’m not exactly at the hoarder stage yet. I can still park my car in the garage and the contents of the garage are (more or less) in some semblance of order. I know where the luggage is, and can get to it. I know where the cleaning supplies are; I know where the Christmas stuff is located . . . but . . . but . . . in and around and about the organized stuff is a plethora of minutia and detritus . . . what high falutin’ words to describe junk!!
Really!!
So, when it is not too hot or too cold, which, with my sensibilities and in Redding, amounts to about three days a year, I stand in the garage and try to begin sorting things according to what is garbage, what I need to save and what the kids are going to want. It is at this juncture that all semblance of rational tho’t deserts my mental processes.
It isn’t totally a matter of what the kids want. If I were to ask them , they’d probably tell me to get rid of all of it. Rather it’s more a matter of what I want them to have and why I want them to have it. For me there is the matter of accepting that what is important to me is NOT necessarily what is important to them and being able to tell the difference!.
Do they really want the pictures of places I’ve been. Heck, both of them have been to places I can’t even dream about including all the places I HAVE been. But they do need to know about their grandmother’s purple glass and that when we lived in the desert she used to put it out on the garage roof so that it would turn purple faster. But do they need her travel logs . . . . probably not, and probably neither do I. She kept them mostly to settle arguments about where and when she and my step dad had traveled. In the 28 years since her death I’ve not looked at them, not even once.
How about the first Christmas present I ever bought my mother out of my earnings from my first job? It’s a pretty ugly carafe. I keep it because it has sentimental value to me . . . but will it, or should it have any sentimental value to them? I dunno. . . . The longer I slog thru the stuff accumulated over almost 80 years of living, the more I realize that I really do not know.
And what do I do with my former relative’s wedding dress . . . or the veil and the lace from my wedding dress, for that matter? I already know about the costume that I saved that my daughter made for the polka scene in The King and I. It’s headed, per her instructions, to Riverfront Playhouse Costume Closet.
Then there’s my son’s prized fishing reel. I KNOW he wants that. He has said so. But then I face the dilemma of putting it somewhere safe . . . and then REMEMBERING where I put it so it “wouldn’t get lost!.” For me, that has proven to be one of the surest ways to lose something.
About this point I usually head back into the house for a cup of coffee and proceed to find plenty of other stuff to do so that I don’t have to go back into the garage again. . . . at least not today.
Adrienne Jacoby is a 40-plus-year resident of Shasta County and native-born Californian. She was a teacher of vocal music in the Enterprise Schools for 27 years and has been retired for 11 years.
A musician all her life, she was married to the late Bill Jacoby with whom she formed a locally well -known musical group who prided themselves in playing for weddings, wakes, riots, bar mitzvas and super market openings. And, oh yes … she has two children, J’Anna and Jayson.
