A Place for Me

by Janis Patterson

I call it my office, though that is a grandiose term for a small desk on the short wall of the guest room. Still, it’s mine, and I can go in there, close off the outside world and work. At least, that’s the way it was supposed to be. After some much-needed (and unfortunately ongoing) remodeling on the house and the decision to get rid of our storage units, which necessitated the sorting and going through of all kinds of family stuff, my office without warning morphed into an overcrowded lumber room. It seemed that everything that we wanted to keep but didn’t have an immediate place or which had to be looked through in order to determine final distribution got dumped in there. Now I have a high tolerance for clutter, but all of a sudden it went over the top when I couldn’t turn my desk chair around.

As a consequence I have been opening boxes and sorting and getting rid of stuff! That which we definitely want to keep but have no immediate place for (such as my great-great-grandmother’s sugar bowl, creamer and spoons dish) is carefully packed into uniform new boxes and stored in the garage, which has been remodeled just for such a purpose. Our favorite charity, an orphanage for abused and abandoned animals, has received several pick-up loads of still-good castoffs for resale in their charity shop.

And still the stuff is there! I have decided that one of the secret truths of the universe is that both boxes and books breed. And generally faster than we can sort them. We have been on this decluttering, downsizing ideology since our marriage (when we combined the stuff from four separate households – long story) and it seems that we have more stuff now than when we started. I tell you, it breeds!

One of the major decisions is to make the room more officelike. We have a suite of antique furniture in there – double bed, dresser, chest and nightstand – that had belonged to my father’s mother and is over 100 years old. It’s beautiful and I love it, and not just because it came to me when I was about ten to become my girlhood furniture. It’s just that the stuff is massive and the guest room is a very small room. So – we have decided to continue using the chest and dresser, but get rid of the mattress and springs and knock the bed down. It will be stored with other ancestral pieces in the garage. We’re going to replace it with a single (antique, of course) bed that belonged to The Husband’s family. That will still allow us to shelter a guest, and give me the convenience of a daybed/couch in my office, but free up so much room.

Another thing I have decided to do is hang pictures. The room had two or three in it from the beginning, conventionally hung one to a wall. A sad fact is that our house has a very open floor plan, which means there is very little wallspace for hanging things. As we were going through things I found so many paintings and things that I love, so I decided to hang them. All of them. The result is solid blocks of paintings on every wall and I love it, though the visual cacophony is something of a sensory overload. Neither are the styles congruent. There are huge paintings from J.K. Durbin and Brad Jernigan and 3 or 4 from my mother’s mother, the smallest of this lot being roughly 2x3feet. There are smaller ones by James Rather and Bud Biggs and my parents and an aunt. There are an antique floral chromolithograph and a 17^th century copper repousse Madonna and Child. There are some 1,000 year old scraps of incredibly detailed Wari weavings and a rattle and a blowpipe (complete with carefully sheathed darts) from the Peruvian jungles. Are the darts poison-tipped? I don’t know and I’m being very careful not to find out! I have some of the original artwork from Danny and the Dustbunnies, my only (so far) children’s book. There are two original D. R. Rago archaeological illustrations of an ancient skull. Also, there’s an ornate brass oil lamp from an 18^th century Middle Eastern monastery library and a small collection of reverse-paintings on glass.

Yes, I have very diverse tastes.

The Husband wonders if all this color and crowding might not be distracting from my work. I don’t think so. I am surrounded by things I love, things that each have their own special, personal history for me, things from all kinds of places and times. To me that’s inspiring, not distracting. It makes a somewhat generic guest room into my nest.

Now if I can just get ahead of the brown paper boxes….

Writer, Interrupted

by Janis Patterson

Our family has always been keepers. Not hoarders, but keepers. Things that are parts of our family history. Things that might be useful someday. Or simply, things that are simply too good to get rid of. That’s how we ended up with a garage full of stuff. And when I say full, I mean full! This oversized two car garage was packed so tightly we couldn’t have fitted an anorexic mouse in there.

Over the years periodically we’d decide to do something about it. We had plans to make it half into an organized storage facility with shelves and steel pallets and half into a workshop (I call it a ‘Boom Room’) for The Husband. We’d make a concentrated but short-lived attempt to get it cleaned out. The local animal-benefit charity shop loved us, because with every attempt they got a nice haul of stuff. But then other things – trips, rocket meets, gun shows, writer’s meetings, that sort of thing – got in the way and the garage would once again slip into oblivion on our radar.

Then not too long ago we realized how long we had been talking about doing the garage and, in a moment of bravado, booked the contractor to arrive on a certain date. Then we looked at the garage and ALL THAT STUFF! Gulp.

Well, there was no way we could sort through all those boxes and bags and suitcases in time to have the garage cleared before the contractor and his crew showed up, so we did the next best thing. We rented a storage room – a rather large storage room – on the edge of town and have been frantically moving things there willy-nilly for the last ten days. We? The Husband goes to his job Monday through Friday and can only work on the weekend, leaving guess who to haul stuff around during the week. Of course, I have a job too – I write, you know – but in the light of the present emergency my computer is getting a nice rest. I’m not. Sometimes life just gets in the way.

My mother did not raise me to be a stevedore, but necessity drives, so during the week I load up my SUV (which seems to be rather ashamed to be carrying such a shabby cargo), drive to the storage unit, unload, return and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

Did I tell you I’ve discovered one of the great secrets of the universe? Boxes breed. They really do. After a day of moving I swear there are more boxes in the garage than there were when I started. Sigh.

It doesn’t help that we are dealing with four households – mine, The Husband’s, my late parents’ and what my mother had from her mother’s house. You can name almost anything and we have at least three of them. To complicate matters, my late mother was the family historian who kept all kinds of family memorabilia from photographs to a pump head to plow harrows to an ancient scythe (I’m fixed for costume parties from now on!) to an 1830 blanket box which strongly resembles a recently dug up coffin. We have furniture that came to Texas in a covered wagon in the 1840s and a settee and two chairs that date from my great-uncle’s first term as a State Legislator back in the twenties. I think we are the only house on the block to have our own anvil.

Not all was lost during this last weekend, though. The Husband and I took an entire pick-up load of stuff to the charity shop. And there is method in our madness in carrying stuff away to storage. That way we ensure that only things we wish to keep will come back to the house… and the charity shop is conveniently located between home and the storage facility!

I may not be getting much writing done, but it is a good feeling to know that our dreams of the garage are actually coming true and that our discards are benefiting the scores of homeless animals who so desperately need help. It’s also sad in a way, because I am getting rid of things I would rather not, but have no need of nor space for. There are some things I’m keeping, though, like the anvil. It might be useful someday.