Disposing

Some projects are just big.  Eventually my house will require selling, likely forced, likely a burden to whichever of my survivors inherits this task.  I started.  My basement has the most unselected collection, stuff that I put there, my wife put there, the kids dropped off when they moved far enough to require air travel to their homes.  I have a lot of stuff stored there, most not needed, or even desired.  To make headway, I committed one of my semi-annual projects to its clearance.  Twenty minutes, twice weekly.  I've kept to that.  One recycling bin fully loaded, though pickup occurs only biweekly.  One big box taken to the state's twice monthly free shredding service.  

Amid the clutter, mice have found cozy nooks.   For the past twenty minutes I have tackled crawl space.  The state's program collects hazardous waste twice weekly, though in different locations.  I have a lot of paint.  Oil paints collected each week, latex only twice a month, on different days than the shredding.  So now I need to sort my paint cans.  I think most are latex.  At the edge of the crawl space, I found my medical books. Some thin monographs might still be of interest despite publication fifty years ago.  The textbooks do not yet qualify as antiques.  Those go to landfill.  My class notes fill a box.  I could empty the loose leafs to recycling, and either harvest or discard the binders.  One box, infested by mice, has my wife's unopened mail from nearly a quarter century ago. I extracted every paper, saved two of personal interest, emptied the box of its rodent calling cards, and then tote the paper and its box to recycling.

At some stage I will require professional help.  Our baby stuff predates modern safety standards.  We have mattresses, deteriorating carpet remnants, old patio furniture, obsolete or otherwise unusable furnishings that the kids dropped by.  I found a tambourine, usable.  I found part of a globe, not usable.  Along the crawl space we kept the children's school collections.  Photograph a few samples, recycle the rest.

There are services that could do some, along the lines of 1-800 Got Junk.  I think I can still make progress on my own, not counting items too heavy to lift or too bulky to fit in a garbage or recycling collection bin.  One or two boxes at a time.  Eye on the calendar for the state's collection dates.  Forty minutes a week, enforced with a timer, will enable the basement to function better.

Some things really have no home.  VHS tapes fill three boxes.  I discarded the pre-recorded movies.  I do not know which tapes just have convenient TV show recordings and which are videos of my children growing up.  

My first library loan of the calendar year was a ebook, The Swedish Art of Death Cleaning.  It expressed the same premise that I figured out on my own.  Either I dispose of my stuff or my survivors will.  While clearing a basement has its roadblocks, the bulky, the sentimental, things that are not mine, the book also had sections of my cyberspace imprint.  I'd like to keep some of that, my blog, YouTubes, other imprints of me that can survive me.  It may be cyberspace clutter, but cyberspace is big.  My basement is more finite.  I simply need to be persistent and decisive, convinced of the worthiness of my effort.