Clutter Control

I have my own way of dealing with clutter. If I don’t use something in a year, the next time I see it, I throw it out. I’m merciless about it. With the exception of daughter Jess’ softball trophies and other keepsakes, nothing is spared from the one-year throwaway rule.

I wasn’t always this way. Back in ’81, I had everything I’d ever owned, right down to the tin piggybank with the time of my birth engraved on it. But when Brenda and I decided to move from Burnettown, S.C., to Nashville, we had to get our volume down to a load that would fit in a 24-foot U-Haul truck. I started the purge with letters from my first high school sweetheart, who took up with a nine-fingered man. I rubber-banded wads of her letters to bricks and hurled them into the swamp behind my house. Pretty soon, it started to feel good, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

Over the course of that move-out week, when I saw something I could live without, I put it in a pile next to the Jowers swamp. After I topped off the pile, I started throwing away my old marbles, my outgrown shoes, tins of shoe polish and ammo for pistols, rifles and shotguns. I launched the things one-by-one into the swamp mud and enjoyed the sucking sound that guaranteed they were gone for good.

Then I started on the stuff my daddy Jabo Jowers left behind when he died 10 years earlier. I started with the small stuff—Jabo’s collection of nuts and bolts, then the drill bits and the metal patterns. After that, I tackled the bigger stuff—the rusted power tools, a broken-down air compressor the size of a lawn tractor, and finally, a riding lawnmower that wouldn’t mow anymore. The contents of Jabo’s old sheet-metal shop and his dead machines have been resting deep under the swamp mud for about a quarter-century now, just downhill from the creekside graves of my unfortunate dogs.

Looking back on the moving-to-Nashville purge, I can’t help but think about Brenda’s daddy Grady, who caught the chariot to heaven back in the summer of ’06. Grady was born during the depression and was convinced that he would need extra toothpicks, rotten shoelaces and cracked soap scraps one day. If Grady had walked up while I was throwing things into the swamp, he would’ve put on waders and started pulling the things out of the mud and onto the bank.

When Grady plowed the fire lanes on his farm, if he turned up a washer with the disk harrow, he’d get off the tractor, put the washer in his pocket, take it home, rub some machine oil on it, and stick it in a drawer with other washers of the same size. He had a labeled drawer for everything he picked up, including unknown animal parts.

Grady kept every mattress he ever owned. Sure, they’d been shut up in a humid hut full of bugs, rodents, reptiles and feral cats for 20 years, but if somebody had come to Grady asking for a rotten emergency mattress full of snakes, mice and cat pee, Grady would’ve been glad to accommodate.

Unlike Brenda and her daddy, who shared a hoarding gene, I’m wired to throw things away, leave them behind, sink them in the swamp mud. I get a little mad at things that disappoint me or get in my way, and I itch to discard them. Well, except for dogs. I’ve tolerated many a pesky and disappointing dog, right up to the day I had to bury the dog in the creek bank next to the swamp.

The less stuff I have to keep up with, the better I feel. When I buy a two-pack of vacuum cleaner belts, I put one belt on the vacuum cleaner and throw the other one away. When I finish reading a book, I give it away. I don’t look at my high school yearbooks, and I don’t have keepsakes. Christmas, family reunions, old photographs and reminiscences make me irritable. I rarely visit graves.

Best I can tell, some people just have to have their stuff out front where they can see it and enjoy it. And some of us have to put our stuff so far behind us, so deep under the dirt and mud, that we know it’s gone and it won’t come back.