Cleaning Out The Museum

Yesterday was like a day at the museum, actually more like a day in the basement of the museum. See, after 21 years in this house we are finally replacing the carpeting upstairs. In order to do so, we have to clean out five closets. They are as follows:

Study closet—the place where the archives of our entire lives can be found, including the paperwork from every trip we’ve taken, every lesson plan Pam produced during her teaching career as well as every single document produced during her 13 years of working in Children’s Church at Grove Avenue Baptist Church.

Toy closet—every Halloween costume our kids ever wore, every Discovery Toys game they ever played, two armored divisions of army men, every Disney VHS movie ever made, the obligatory slinkie, American Girl paraphernalia, every CD of every choir concert either of our kids ever performed in.

Patrick’s closet—you just don’t want to know.

Kaitlin’s closet—what you would expect to find in a closet shared by Anne of Green Gables and the Baby-Sitter’s Club President.

Our closet—the only one of the five being used daily so the only one not a complete disaster.

By the end of the day, I had hauled four absurdly heavy giant contractor-sized black garbage bags outside to the garbage, made one trip to Hope Thrift with a car full of donations, and dumped $92.52 worth of coins into The Coin Machine at Publix’s.

Along the way, Pam would take photographs of items she either didn’t recognize or was unsure what to do with. We have caught grief from our adult children in the past for previous purges, and were taking no chances this time around. So Pam would hand me something and say, “Hold this!” Then she would take a picture and send it to the kids. Here are two such photographs:

My daughter laughed at one of these and replied...Dad’s face!!! Hahahahaha...

I fail to see the humor.

Along the way, we found our Passports, which was nice. Also, I stumbled across a sizable stack of short stories, forty year old journal entries, and a shocking amount of poetry with my name listed as the author...very little of which I remember writing. Several times, I found Pam sitting on the floor cross-legged amidst a pile of papers, lost in thought and close to tears. At the end of the day, as we sat in a booth at Casa Grande eating supper at 8 o’clock, we both were lost in thought at the trail of years we had just plowed through. It was the smallest artifacts which prompted the strongest feelings...finding Patrick’s Boy Scout troop badge, the three ring binder Pam put together for Kaitlin’s college search trip, and these two hand made treasures... 



This was how she spent her weekends leading up to the arrival of our two kids, back when cross-stitching was a thing. 

Over tacos we thought about our lives together, what a whirlwind it has been. Where in the world did we get the energy to make it through Little League, choir concerts, field days, back yard Bible Clubs, ski trips, summer camps? And that’s just the pathos produced by TWO CLOSETS!!

Here’s the advantage of finding, loving, and holding on to one another for 36 years. On a cold night in February 2020, we can smile across the table at each other and silently know that it’s been a good life, one that we wouldn’t trade for anything.