It’s all in the definition: chic casual clutter or pack rat
By Jane Holahan
Updated Feb 19, 2007 15:52
I am a catch-up reader.
Stacks of magazines grow steadily on my coffee table, and I swear I’m going to get to them one of these days. I will clip out that Christmas cookie recipe from Martha Stewart’s Living, and I will read Time’s Man of the Year issue. I swear I will.
It’s part of a bigger problem.
I don’t hang up my coat when I get home from work. Coats are floating around, one slung across a dining room chair, another hanging from the stair rail.
Mail stacks up on my dining room table because I don’t get to it right away. Shoes I wore weeks ago have become permanent fixtures in the corner of my living room. Have they become a post-modern sculpture or yet another sign of a sloppy housekeeper?
I want to be a neat freak. I admire people who instinctively put things away as they go along and throw away what they don’t need.
Alas, I am not one of them.
I’m the type who lets things get to the point where it looks like a tornado hit my house, and then I go into cleaning mode. And I like being in cleaning mode. It makes me feel like I have some control over my life.
This weekend, it was time to take down the Christmas tree — OK, well past the time to take down the Christmas tree — vacuum up the needles and put the house back into order. It was time to say goodbye to Rudolph and the pine cone candles and my favorite ladybug tree ornament for another year, stuff everything into boxes and shove them into the basement, which is its own messy disaster.
There are several boxes in my basement filled with Christmas ornaments I don’t display anymore. They are ugly or broken or incomplete. Why don’t I throw them away? Why don’t I clear the decks and organize the Christmas stuff into a few boxes so that next year, I don’t have to hunt and search for the ornaments I want to put out?
Clearing away the holiday decorations gives you the perfect opportunity to start fresh, to declare that from now on, you’re going to be neat and organized and clutter-free.
I vow every year to become a new person and always end up breaking my resolution. It’s gotten to the point where my friends just laugh at me when I declare my intentions.
No wonder. My personality just won’t allow me to be neat and organized, to throw away the things I don’t need or want anymore.
Considering my family, it’s clearly a genetic trait.
Look at my father and brother. About 10 years ago, when we moved my father out of the family house he’d lived in since 1960, it was up to my brother and me to clean out the house. It was a huge job that we had to do in a limited time.
My dad was hopeless. Under his watch, we couldn’t give away any of his books because he might want to reread one some day. And a 20-year-old jar full of brittle rubber bands might have some purpose in his new apartment.
You could always chalk my dad’s pack-rat ways to the fact he grew up in the Depression and knew the value of every penny.
We sent him to stay at a hotel and got down to business.
But my brother turned out to be a younger edition of my dad.
At one point, we got into a shouting match over a cookie cutter. I was about to throw it away, and he actually took it out of my hands and told me it could be useful to someone. No, it wasn’t some sentimental cookie cutter that my mother used. I don’t think my mother ever made a cookie in her life.
But my brother saw some future existence for this cookie cutter and insisted on giving it another chance.
The absolute worst came when I tried to throw away a bag of paint rags my mother had used a decade earlier when she painted the kitchen. I threw them out and my brother retrieved them from the backyard garbage can. They might come in handy some time.
Obviously, the pack-rat gene thrives in my family.
What can I do but continue to struggle? I will try to hang up my coats and clip those Christmas cookie recipes before spring.
Just don’t expect much from me. After all, my 2004 Christmas tree is still behind my porch (along with the 2005 one now), waiting to be turned into mulch.
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The Voices column is written by a rotating team of New Era staffers. It appears Mondays.
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