"Dig we must"

Dear Readers,

You can file this column under the heading “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” I am referring to the mess I got myself into this past week. It was a crusade I embarked on filled with ambition, confidence and (as it is turning out) a heaping helping of naivety. And if I had known what I was getting myself into I never would have initiated this project.

It all started after I Spring Cleaned the house. I went from room to room, dusting, sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, wiping and scrubbing. Then I took inventory of all the things we tend to keep for no other reason than we somehow acquired them and therefore feel some sense of responsibility for keeping them. Whether we use them or not is inconsequential. So the things in the house I wouldn’t use in a hundred years were relegated to the big shed for a dignified retirement. And that’s where the trouble started.

This big shed is so much more than a storage facility. It is a garage, a barn, a workshop, a potting shed, a foul-weather meeting place and sometime shelter for birds and critters who happen by. It is an all-Kansan, all-purpose country living extension of the home itself. It is 40’ wide x 60’ long x 30’ high and, sigh, one big old junk drawer. And here is where the insanity crept in. I reasoned that if I could polish up the house from stem to stern four times a year I could at least bestow the same consideration on that venerable shed. I mean, how long could it take? Maybe three, four hours max.

Well, dear readers, I am on Day Three and there is scarce light at the end of this tunnel. The more I dig into the mountain of miscellany the more useless stuff I find. My sorting piles—keep it, throw it out, give it away, recycle it, sell it, burn it, what the heck is this anyway?—are overflowing. And each item merits some introspection.

Do I really need the rear car seats from that 1997 Ford Explorer that was junked when Barack Obama was president? Why do I have 18 empty five-gallon buckets? It they were useful shouldn’t they have something IN them? They are also stacked inside each other and dynamite couldn’t separate them. Why do I have 32 tent stakes? That tent blew away last fall. Why am I saving them? To stake down the next giant that happens by like a good Lilliputian? And why in the world did I think cardboard boxes make good shed storage containers? Not a one of them hasn’t been usurped by homesteading Rodentia.

But as the ol’ road signs used to say—Dig We Must. And I’ll keep digging until this nightmare of my own making comes to an end. So was it a good idea at the time? Heck, no. But when I am done I will convince myself otherwise. I will have made lots of room for the generations of junk to shift from house to shed in the future. And this cycle of life will perpetuate itself. Oh, before I go—anyone need 27 expired license plates?   

Keep your eyes on the stars and your back to the wind.