North Star Writers Group

I am not a packrat. I faithfully make a quarterly trip to Goodwill. I give things – and I’m talking about good things – to garage sales for charity, or in general, to people I know who need or would enjoy those things.

Just last week, I went on a bag-cleansing rampage. I got rid of three purses, one laptop backpack, one duffle bag and a clutch. They went to Goodwill, a coworker, my brother-in-law and the six-year-old daughter of a friend, respectively.

This rampage was sparked by some pretty exciting news. My husband and I are expecting child number two. And we’re going to need every spare inch we can find in our house. I’m talking about space under beds, the soon-to-be-former pet supplies shelf, and even windowsills are sure to be fair game.

So I’ve been consolidating, trashing, donating and lots of other “ing” words that mean “getting rid of.” Of course, I’m not completely void of sentimental value. I have things that I’d never dream of giving up. My grandfather’s war medals. Family photos of greats and great-greats that I’ve never met, but that are etched in my mind as well as my scrapbook.

But there are things that I can’t for the life of me figure out why I don’t get rid of. For example, I have a silver desk clock that’s had a dead battery for seven years. Seven years. I don’t know where I got it, or why, every time, it escapes my giveaway pile.

I’ve also got a picture that a five-year-old, a former friend’s son, colored for me sometime in the late 1980s. Thing is, I haven’t spoken to that friend in years. I haven’t seen her son since he was five, and now, he’s out of high school. Neither of them would recognize me if I walked into their house tomorrow.

My husband, on the other hand, is a saver. And of very big things that take up lots of room. Like the lovely broken dresser that resides in our basement. It’s got a few – a few hundred – stickers on it. Band stickers. Skateboard company stickers. (It was a phase). Hockey team stickers. The dresser used to have five drawers, and ten drawer pulls. Today it has four drawers. Three that work. And five pulls.

I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to get him to get rid of it for years. Why should he get all that space when everything I hold on to for unknown reasons could fit into one drawer of that dresser? I’m trying to teach him the “saving frugality” that was taught to me by my mother. We always lived in houses smaller than she’d hoped, and she taught me to minimize along with the best of them. It was great training for my first one-room apartment in Jersey.

I moved around a lot in my life, and maybe that’s why I’ve always been baffled by savers.

But, I am in love with one. My husband saves broken dressers. I can live with that, especially when some people save their positive pregnancy tests. While I can understand the sentimental value, things that have been urinated on don’t even fit his criteria for hanging on to.

Not that I’m a stranger to bodily odors finding a home in our basement. The grossest thing I’ve ever pitched was my husband’s old hockey equipment bag. At the end of the last season he played – approximately 2003 – he neglected to unpack the bag and wash the items inside. Recently, I made the mistake of opening it to see if anything inside was salvageable. It took my olfactory organs two weeks to recover.

So, baby number two has brought us a sense of wonderment for what the future holds. Getting ready for his or her arrival has also brought back a lot of memories.

It’s just that some smell sweeter than others.

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This is Column # CD041. Request permission to publish here.