A Chaos of Objects

The past two weeks I’ve been sorting through a chaos of objects, from large as a drill press to tiny as a post-it, in boxes and piles so spread about it was a dangerous dance getting through our good-sized basement. This is not a skill area for me, although I’ve come to, if not enjoy, at least be obsessed with its completion.

Much of the work has been fairly straightforward: put the chisels with the carving tools with the screwdrivers and call them all long-handled tools with a business end. Crescent wrench goes with pliers go with sockets and drivers because they’re all about loosening and tightening. Et cetera. That part was relatively easy.

The hard part came with all the papers and pictures and cards, letters and journals, the objets de whatever. That’s what got me to thinking about the larger meaning of this strange but commonplace activity. It’s like, “Are you on the bus or off the bus?” over and over again.

For example, take the daughters’ pictures. It’s not easy consigning a half dozen of sweet Second Daughter’s preschool graduation pics, even though I’ve already saved one good one, to the same box where I have thrown a leaky liquid nail cartridge. Ditto the Father's Day and Birthday cards. What do I look for when deciding which one makes the cut?

At least initially, that was a question I wrestled with when it came to assigning a fate to the embarrassing things, like the volumes of indescribably puerile writing trying to masquerade as something worthwhile. Fortunately, I argued myself out of the stance that saving a least a selection of such crap is important for understanding "my development."

Some of the stuff I've been going through is cringe-worthy and some of it downright sad, like Mom’s hour-by-hour description of what Dad went through his last two days on this earth. I imagine her detailing his suffering as a way to maintain her own sanity and semblance of poise in his time in extremis.

The sorting is complete now, at least for this move. I never came up with a formula. Every day it seemed like I had different criteria for the task, and some things I just put in boxes to give to the daughters. Let them perform their own triage. For me, for now, this shit is squared away: