Boxing Days

Oh, so how's it going, with the cleaning up of the box room and all that? Well, when Kathryn left here and went home, she'd cleaned the former box room, now the guest/dog room (but not guest dog room: we have limits), and had talked it over and done some things here, and I was going to keep going back to the stuff regularly, building up my muscles of discuration just as I had earlier built up my muscles of acquisition. As we're at the part of the fairy tale where all the characters march past and vanish over the horizon in a line, it turns out I'm the one who has to operate them. (Who said that's only fair? This is because it's mostly my stuff, right? Typical.)

So. On a day to day basis, I've been going back in and deciding, reckoning, a few things at a time, just up to where my brain begins to fill with small white styrofoam pellets and I have to stop. I've freed up a number of boxes, partly through the clever trick of taking the stuff out of them and piling it here and there, but the piles have meanings: There are stay piles, and there are go piles.

And today I took out the low-hanging fruit by cleaning up boxes from places in the box room, and in the dining room, and the angle of the stairs in back, and in the garage. I emptied whatever was left in them (packing junk, mostly, though I discovered that my window fan came with a bug screen, which I promptly attached), then flattened them and cut them up and stacked the pieces in the largest of the boxes. If they leave us that box, as they generally do, it'll be one of the next to go. I keep finding books I know I can get rid of before other books, so they go on a pile for that. I found my harmonicas. I find boxes that are over 50% air. This'll get easier and harder, variously, but I'm in it.

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