The Closets of Doom

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day…and neither were the “Closets of Doom.”

I felt a bit like Frodo Baggins as he set off in the “Lord of the Rings” for the far-away land of Mordor, with death and adventure just over the horizon. Not a clue as to what was really in store, just a sense of foreboding that righteously kept on building.

I had set the Fates in motion by ordering new carpeting just before New Years Day for two bedrooms and four closets. It seemed like a good idea at the time, replacing the last of the original carpeting that was a quarter century old and dated back to day one of the house. It seemed like a particularly good and timely idea, given that I’d ripped a hole in the ball of my foot a few weeks earlier by getting snagged on a tacking strip laid bare by years of regular foot traffic in front of the bathroom. Nothing screams “immediate home improvement” like personal injury and a tetanus shot.

And like Frodo, I really had no idea what I was getting in to. I just knew the job would be big. Piles of dust-collecting stuff had to get moved off the floors, beds broken down and mattresses and springs stored sideways in the family room, clothes removed from closets and dumped anywhere but where they belonged. I signed the paperwork on New Years Eve, smiled, and promised to be ready in four days. Two days later—with one long and expensive visit to the doggie emergency room, the discovery of a giant ice dam under the blanket of snow on my kitchen roof, and the beginnings of the flu—I caved in to reality and rescheduled for a week after. It still nearly killed me, and I still barely made it.

I am a victim of my own bad habits. I have a mixture of methods for cleaning up the place, and none of them is good. The two major ones are the “piling system,” and the “hurry company’s coming, scoop it off the table, put it in a laundry basket, and I’ll look at it tomorrow” system. Judging by the number of piles and the baskets, tomorrow would never come. But all of a sudden, tomorrow was just around the corner, arriving with 100% polyester carpeting, vapor-proof padding, and a team of installers expecting a lot of elbow room. I fought my natural laissez-faire tendencies and got to work.

Cleaning out the closets of course didn’t start with the closets. Instead there was a reverse (or you could say perverse) domino effect in play. In order to make temporary room for the stacks and boxes of assorted detritus in the bedrooms and the closets, other areas of the house were going to have to go under the knife. I started with the bookcase in the living room. Five grocery bags of discarded books later, I set to the task of clearing out every recyclable magazine in the house. They dated back to…well, some of them in untouched drawers and unexplored corners of my universe, dated back twenty five years. I resisted the urge to sit down right there and read those old back copies of “Ireland of the Welcomes” and “National Wildlife.” Reached a compromise with my inner packrat by saving just a few for the “read ’em later” pile and pitching the rest. Seventeen pairs of shoes and boots made their way to Goodwill. And then I finally got serious.

With the record albums, extra photos, high school memorabilia, dust bunnies and empty CD cases finally out of the way, the closets were left, yawning, bottomless pits of memorabilia and who knew what else. I tossed and turned for nights in bleak anticipation, overwhelmed by the magnitude of hauling and sifting and winnowing, seized by the same paralyzing dread that sets in with any unfamiliar challenge and the question, “will I make it to the finish line before the deadline?” Hercules tackling the Augean stables had it easy by comparison. Not only could he marshal the forces of nature to help him out, diverting two rivers to tackle the mother of all messy jobs…he didn’t have to worry about putting anything back.

Down to the wire, I finally dug in. My older son joined me for part of the adventure, and his sense of wonderment at our assorted finds bordered on the archeological.

Quite the treasure trove revealed itself, like the recesses of Aladdin’s cave. As we peeled back the various strata, there were heartwarming markers of family history…and just plain weirdness. Shotgun shells (regular and “high velocity”) and an ancient service revolver. My Little Ponies. Beanie Babies. Duck decoys. Embroidery floss in dozens of colors, dating back to a time when aspiring to be a domestic goddess was higher on my to-do list. A note to Santa from my oldest daughter nearly two decades before, asking for Nancy Drew mysteries and Black Stallion books and “lots of surprises!” Fencing foils. A gyroscope. A large rock with a bunny picture painted on it. An Austrian dirndl. Scuba fins and snorkels. A child’s dinosaur costume with a four-foot long spiked tail. A jacket left behind by Henri, our French foreign exchange student from the summer before. A twelve-foot molted python skin. A lap loom. A recurve longbow. Bamboo fishing rod. A black and white photo of me taken at the age of twenty-one in college, sitting long-haired and demure in a sundress with a rose in my teeth. Another, from an even earlier time when I was four or five, dressed in a sequined tutu on my grandmother’s porch on Hirsch Street in Chicago, kicking my ballet slippered foot over my head.

Little by little, the journey into the “Closets of Doom” took on the warmth of memory, and the dread disappeared like fog under the morning sun. The long Donegal tweed cape? A memento of a month-long trip to Ireland made on shoestring after I graduated from college the first time. Traveling with a bicycle and a backpack, I’d gone wherever the wind took me around the country, determined to see all I could, sure that I’d never again make my way around with quite such carefree abandon. The Austrian dirndl outfit—white “middy” blouse, red peasant jumper flecked with tiny flowers, striped blue and white apron—dated back to a study trip through Europe with my high school classmates and history teacher. I bought it in Salzburg…and it had accidently shrunk beyond hope of wearing by the time we left Madrid. I’d never wanted to get rid of it.

And the diminutive packs of wooden matches from the “Enchantment Resort” outside Sedona? A reminder that not that long ago I’d fled the state of Wisconsin to celebrate one gloomy mid-winter birthday under sunny blue skies instead. Rather than walking into my office to find a stuffed buzzard perched on the back of my chair and some black balloons to help me “celebrate,” my friend Annie B and I went sleeveless and hiked the “Eagle’s Nest” trail in Arizona’s Red Rock State Park near Sedona, then enjoyed a delectable gourmet lunch at the secluded, luxury resort on the outskirts of Sedona, dining on the patio as the warm sun gleamed off red rock canyons rising starkly above us. We finally returned to her home that evening, to bask in the hot tub next to the pool while sipping margaritas we made with oranges picked in her backyard. A memory worth re-igniting…particularly in the dead of winter.

Bit by bit, twenty five years of assorted memorabilia made its way off the closet floor and either on to higher shelves out of the way or into other rooms, to be condensed and reassembled later. The carpet installers arrived on time in a flurry of Spanish and testosterone and cheerful efficiency, leaving pristine empty rooms with soft surfaces underfoot and the smell of fresh synthetic fibers lingering in the air. Hiding out in my kitchen as they worked, in the few square feet unfilled by displaced furniture and unsorted papers, I finally tackled my Christmas cards two weeks late. The “closets of doom” emptied in time, I could finally relax.

As for eventually getting all that stuff back in the closets? Well…that’s beginning to look more and more like Pandora’s Box…