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Cleaning House
Jun. 15th, 2009 12:23 pmOne of my goals for the year, beyond getting a job, is to clean out my parents' house. To some this might seem a trivial goal. Not so much for me and my family. You see, my father has something of an attachment to things. He's not exactly a hoarder, but he is one part materialist and another part honorary Great Depression baby. He can't stand to throw things out or put them away. And, it's gotten worse as he's gotten older. What this all adds up to is a house that has slowly filled up with useless things over the course of 17 years of occupancy.
I'm so glad I've been able to shake this strong emotional attachment to needless things. It took a long time to expel from myself this attitude that I grew up with that things are the most important. We must have our things and be defined by our things. No. Not anymore. My sibling and I have grown disgusted with this attitude and way of life and we're damned determined to change what we can. My mother has felt for years like she's living in squalor. Oh, the main areas of the house stay neat and tidy and clean, but any place out of the way just a little is a disaster and has been for years. The guest room I showed pictures of in the previous entry, for instance, was taken over by discarded things that my father just wouldn't part with. They just piled up in ever increasingly tall stacks until the room was unpassable. It is even worse in the basement. The basement was so full of just plain garbage that it looked like the aftermath of a flood. Just knowing it is in such horrible condition is literally a weight on me. I can't imagine how my mother feels.
But, naturally, with his emotional attachment being so strong to the knowledge that all these things are stuffed away somewhere, my father was not about to let us just clean up. Oh no. It took some secret meetings with our mother and, finally, the opportunity and motivation to just up and start it. My father was washing the cars in the front yard on Saturday. So, after getting a taste of success from cleaning out the guest room and watching a marathon of Clean House, my sibling grabbed me, some trash bags and recycle bins, and headed down to the basement. My father didn't catch on until hours later and boy was he pissed. But, my mother almost cried tears of joy. After we came up stairs for dinner, she pulled us aside and quietly thanked us wish a sigh of relief.
We had a sedan full of recycle stuffs to cart off to the recycle center on Saturday afternoon. There are so many just half-full cardboard boxes of children's toys and packing peanuts and nothing just strewn about that I can't even describe it. I honestly don't think a single toy or craft supply I or my sibling had from age 7 on up through middle school were ever properly passed on or disposed of. It's nuts. We've had two boxes of recyclable plastics, 4 boxes of paper and paperboard, and another two carloads worth of cardboard in just these past two days! We want to rent a dumpster, but my father won't hear of it. He can't imagine why we'd ever want to get rid of books molded shut or broken children's toys covered in cobwebs. But, even after these two days, we've barely made a dent. It's going to take a while to sift through 17 years of needless, useless junk.
It's both satisfying and depressing to wade through the discarded and broken remnant of my childhood, sorting it between trash, recycle, and donation boxes. It's almost creepy how poetic it is to be an out of work adult forced by circumstance to live with my parents now weeding through dolls and legos and crayons and coloring books.
Alright. Enough blabber. Onto the crazy photos.
( 30 Photos of What Lurks Below )
I'm so glad I've been able to shake this strong emotional attachment to needless things. It took a long time to expel from myself this attitude that I grew up with that things are the most important. We must have our things and be defined by our things. No. Not anymore. My sibling and I have grown disgusted with this attitude and way of life and we're damned determined to change what we can. My mother has felt for years like she's living in squalor. Oh, the main areas of the house stay neat and tidy and clean, but any place out of the way just a little is a disaster and has been for years. The guest room I showed pictures of in the previous entry, for instance, was taken over by discarded things that my father just wouldn't part with. They just piled up in ever increasingly tall stacks until the room was unpassable. It is even worse in the basement. The basement was so full of just plain garbage that it looked like the aftermath of a flood. Just knowing it is in such horrible condition is literally a weight on me. I can't imagine how my mother feels.
But, naturally, with his emotional attachment being so strong to the knowledge that all these things are stuffed away somewhere, my father was not about to let us just clean up. Oh no. It took some secret meetings with our mother and, finally, the opportunity and motivation to just up and start it. My father was washing the cars in the front yard on Saturday. So, after getting a taste of success from cleaning out the guest room and watching a marathon of Clean House, my sibling grabbed me, some trash bags and recycle bins, and headed down to the basement. My father didn't catch on until hours later and boy was he pissed. But, my mother almost cried tears of joy. After we came up stairs for dinner, she pulled us aside and quietly thanked us wish a sigh of relief.
We had a sedan full of recycle stuffs to cart off to the recycle center on Saturday afternoon. There are so many just half-full cardboard boxes of children's toys and packing peanuts and nothing just strewn about that I can't even describe it. I honestly don't think a single toy or craft supply I or my sibling had from age 7 on up through middle school were ever properly passed on or disposed of. It's nuts. We've had two boxes of recyclable plastics, 4 boxes of paper and paperboard, and another two carloads worth of cardboard in just these past two days! We want to rent a dumpster, but my father won't hear of it. He can't imagine why we'd ever want to get rid of books molded shut or broken children's toys covered in cobwebs. But, even after these two days, we've barely made a dent. It's going to take a while to sift through 17 years of needless, useless junk.
It's both satisfying and depressing to wade through the discarded and broken remnant of my childhood, sorting it between trash, recycle, and donation boxes. It's almost creepy how poetic it is to be an out of work adult forced by circumstance to live with my parents now weeding through dolls and legos and crayons and coloring books.
Alright. Enough blabber. Onto the crazy photos.
( 30 Photos of What Lurks Below )
