Organizing chaos
Sunday, April 30, 2023
I spent my day organizing chaos.
Promptly at 9am, I headed to the parents. I’ve mentioned before, I think, that they bought my grandma’s house. The house that she lived, and raised my dad and his siblings in, for something like 50 years. The house is the 4th oldest in the town, built in the 1880’s. It was once a duplex apartment, turned into a single family home that could accommodate my grandparents’ seven children. I love that house. When I moved back to California, I spent my first year living with my grandma in that house. In the few years before her passing, one of my aunts and her son lived there. It was not ideal. Let’s just say that there’s a LOT of work that needs to be done on that house… which my dad is doing.
The house has a detached garage that was split in two, with one side turned into a shop. It started as a wood shop by my grandpa, who was a wood shop teacher and quite a talented carpenter. After his passing in 1997, one of my aunts used it. After she got married and started a family, my grandma turned it into her quilt shop. It wound up just being storage, for the most part. My grandma usually just quilted in her living room, while watching TV. After passing, the garage and shop were used as storage for all of the stuff that was in the house that none of her children claimed.
I should mention that my grandma was a bit of a hoarder. And a shopper. But it wasn’t like the extreme hoarding shows, where you couldn’t find your way around the house, she was clever in her hoarding. You just had to know where to look… which were the rooms that were “off limits”. It took months for my dad and three of his sisters to go through the house alone. All of that’s to say… I spent SEVEN hours going through boxes stacked floor to ceiling and only made it 2/3 of the way through the room.
I found some very interesting things. First off, my grandma had enough Christmas decorations to decorate every house in town. She would make Clark Griswold look like Scrooge. A lot of the decorations hadn’t ever been opened. Some were older than my 64-year-old dad. My grandma kept EVERY card and piece of mail that was sent to her. I found cards given to her for my uncle’s birth… he’s 70. I found all of her calendars. She had calendars from the 80’s. I found her trinket box from when she was a teenager… she would’ve been 90 this year. I found all of my dad and his siblings school photos and class pictures. I found my dad’s newborn immunization record. She still had my grandpa’s shop overalls… did I mention he passed in 1997? I separated everything into piles by keep, go through/shred, yard sale, and garbage. By the time I was finished, I was covered in grime. Grime that was older than my father.
My OCD had the time of her life.