Housecleaning

Last Saturday, an early cool front rolled through my hometown, dropping the temperature from “suburbs of Hell” hot to the kind of hot that only Yankees whine about. Even though it had been a mild summer, my workshop lacks air conditioning so I could only work in short spurts before tossing my sweat-soaked clothes on the laundry room floor. Stuff piled up.

Due to the cooler temperature, I determined to clean my garage which hadn’t been dealt with in at least six months. In my defense, I do a lot of woodworking projects and in the middle of a project, there’s no time to stop and organize tools or clean sweaty handprints from the tool-steel table saw surface ¬— any woodworker who does that is an amateur. Would you expect a heart surgeon to stop and clean the blood off his favorite scalpel before sewing you back up?

If you’re serious about woodworking, you end up owning a lot of different tools — mine have been collected over fifty years — and that many tools demand a lot of storage space. Likewise, they make large, unruly piles when you’re working on a project and take a long time to herd them back into their cubby holes.

Besides tools, I end up vacuuming up about six or eight gallons of sawdust and picking up an infinite number of wood scraps. One of the hardest parts of garage cleaning is deciding which wood chunks are small enough to go into the burn barrel for Chiminea season and which chunks are large enough to horde for potential use in future projects. I tend to lean towards caution and horde far more scraps of hardwood than I should.

That got me to thinking about all the other crap I have shoved into nooks and crannies around my house that I’ll likely never need or use. I was further reminded about that in a recent conversation with a friend at Spring Creek Church. She’s on a mission to rid her house of every extraneous item. She’s taking stuff to Good Will and throwing out stuff that’s too worn to donate.

She’s even returning books that people have lent her over the years…which reminds me, if you’re one of those jerks I loaned tools to and forgot to make a note of it, that was not a gift!

Anyway, Jessica (that’s her name) inspired me to start thinking about other stuff besides the physical clutter that I’ve neatly tucked away. You know what I’m talking about — the weird stuff you wake up remembering at 4:00AM, like that snotty little girl in sixth grade who shunned you, or the client who filed bankruptcy and left you holding the tab for all your vendors who worked on that client’s projects.

That stuff is “there but not there” at the same time. If I can wake up in the middle of the night, still pissed off about it even though it hasn’t entered my conscious thinking in years, it’s still there, cluttering up my neural pathways and tripping me up in unseen ways.

Maybe I’m the only person who ever does that but I’m betting not. If you’ve found a good house-cleaning solution for all that psycho-clutter, I’m all ears. If not, keep looking and call me when you discover the answer.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to return that electric drill I loaned you in 1987.

A meeting of great minds who think alike