Thursday, Aug. 23, 2012

In my ongoing quest to de-clutter, I’ve made an interesting and somewhat disturbing discovery.  Closets are the exact antithesis of a black hole.  Why?  Simple.  If a black hole is someplace where things that enter get sucked into oblivion never to be seen again, then closets have no business being called black holes.  Why?  Because the items contained within multiply at such an alarming rate that before you know it, taking said items out of the closet could seriously jeopardize the square footage of the adjoining room.  And, in extreme circumstances, there wouldn’t be enough space in the adjoining room to house all the “stuff” pulled out of that closet.

My closet cleaning made me think of my stepmother, a lovely woman who’s house could pass the most rigorous white glove inspection.  Well…it could…so long as the one doing the inspecting didn’t risk life and limb, opening certain closet doors that revealed meticulously stacked items, which closely resembled strata rock layers, the date of when certain items had been wedged into the closet evident by which strata layer it was in.

LOL.

I was a teenager before I learned this “secret” about my stepmother’s housecleaning/organizational skills.  Funny thing was, when she absent-mindedly opened one of said stuffed-to-the-gills closets without thinking, I caught a glimpse of its interior.  My stepmother turned every imaginable shade of mortified red while I stood there in awe of the magnificent stacking job she’d done.  I was mesmerized by how in the heck the items in the closet, many of which might well have predated the dinosaurs, managed to remain in the closet, for they were so tightly crammed in, that one would think they’d be spring-loaded and explode like an opened can of prank snakes when an unsuspecting person opened the closet door.

Over the years of owning houses, I’ve jokingly said that, at times, any walk-in closet I had more closely resembled reach-in closets, for the volume of items contained within them prohibited me from actually stepping into the closet.  This hasn’t always been the case.  Whenever I notice my walk-in closets at risk of becoming reach-ins, a vision of my stepmother’s archeological dig closets comes to mind.  That’s when I set to de-cluttering them.  Course, at first glance, this seems like a simple enough task.  But then I begin pulling items out of the closet and am astounded by just how much “stuff” is contained within.  And that’s when I know…though I didn’t live with my stepmother daily, apparently, I was around her enough to have her overflowing closet tendency rub off on me—somewhat.  Some might think I’d get frustrated with this.  I don’t.  Instead, knowing that I share a common trait with my stepmother makes me smile.