I think my husband Dan has been bitten by the spring-cleaning bug, because this week it bothered him that the office was the only room on the first floor that hadn’t been painted in the past 16 years. And there was a full gallon of yellow sitting in the garage that I’d purchased for the bathroom walls and hadn’t used because he hated it so much.
He decided it was going to be the perfect color for my office. Before I could say ‘wait a minute, let’s think this out,’ he had stripped all the pictures off the walls and pulled the ‘what’s this?’ out of the corners. I made one request. I begged him not to paint the ceiling because I was tired of cleaning paint spatter off the floors.
He was painting the ceiling when I got home from buying groceries.
Afterwards, he built a row of bookshelves to span the entire wall, and asked me to find all the books – including cookbooks - piled here and there around the house to fill it.
There were four large boxes in all. I decided to use the opportunity to cull everything we don’t use or will never read again – and wound up with two overfull boxes destined for a lawn sale.
The following morning, I sorted through them again just in case I threw out something good, and suddenly there was only one box going into storage.
What’s left in the box? I bought “Best of the Best from South Carolina” on the only vacation we ever took. Jeff Smith was a pedophile but I have all nine of his books and they’re excellent, except for the Christmas edition, but that completes the set. Dan bought “Taste of the Adirondacks” for me when we had less than $10 to spend on each other. How could I possibly think about getting rid of those?
Twenty-four hours later, the carton is nearly empty. The fad diet books are still in there – owning them didn’t make me thinner. I can confidently bid bye-bye to “Betty Crocker Salads”, and there’s a cookbook, “Authentic Chinese,” that’s all about eating the gnarly bits. Should I keep that?
I had good intentions a few days ago. I wanted to clear out all the clutter, the theory being that I can't bring new things into my life until I sweep out all the old stuff - feng shui. Or is that called spring cleaning?
I now have a place to put all the books I own and don’t have to part with any of them – but I don’t want to become one of those crazy people that dies in their garage crushed under a mountain of old newspapers, either.
All the books by Vermont authors and everything with “cheese” in the title are staying. “The Frugal Gourmet” collection got a reprieve - but all the community cookbooks and a bunch of soft-covers filled with vegetarian recipes were among those packed away again today.
